Bill Cosby loses sex assault lawsuit and faces a $19 million judgment

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — A civil jury in California on Monday found that Bill Cosby had drugged and sexually assaulted Donna Motsinger, a former server at a Sausalito, California, restaurant, after escorting her to one of his comedy shows in 1972.

The jury awarded Motsinger $19.25 million in damages, a judgment that comes as Cosby, by his own account, has run into financial difficulties.

The decision, on the third day of deliberations, further tarnished the reputation of a man, 88, whose standing as one of America’s most beloved entertainers dissolved as dozens of women came forward in recent years to accuse him of sexual misconduct.

Cosby’s only criminal conviction for sexual assault was overturned for procedural reasons in 2021 after he had served three years of a three- to 10-year sentence at a maximum-security prison outside Philadelphia.

In Motsinger’s lawsuit, brought in Los Angeles Superior Court, she described how Cosby had attacked her when they were both in their 30s, after giving her wine and a pill that had left her incapacitated. Cosby did not testify at the trial and the jury sided with her account.

After the decision, his lawyer Jennifer Bonjean said he would appeal. “I was obviously disappointed in the decision, but we believe we have a strong appeal and we’ll pursue that,” she said.

Motsinger, speaking at the Santa Monica courthouse, welcomed the jury’s decision. “It has been 54 years to get justice, and I know it’s not complete for the rest of the women, but I hope it helps them a little bit,” she said.

She called the damages “icing on the cake.”

She said she realized that, while it was not a criminal trial with a guilty verdict, it was important to her “that I’m believed and he in some way has to be accountable for what he did to me.”

The jury also made a finding of additional punitive damages against Cosby, which have yet to be determined.

Cosby denied the allegations, as he has all accusations brought by the women who have said he was a sexual predator.

He has consistently maintained that any sexual contact he had was consensual. His lawyers have depicted him over the years as someone who unfairly became a target of the emotions stirred by the #MeToo movement.

Years ago, Motsinger’s case would have been time-barred because she did not make the accusation until after the expiration of the statute of limitations for such suits. But her suit became possible because California is among the states that have amended the statutes in sexual assault cases to allow accusers to come forward even after a lengthy passage of time.

Several of Cosby’s accusers, fearing they had been denied their day in court, played a part in the movement that led to the reforms. More than a dozen have filed suits in states including New York and Nevada.

Cosby’s three years in prison came after he was convicted of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand, a former Temple University employee to whom Cosby had become a mentor. He was freed after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that a “non-prosecution agreement” with a previous prosecutor meant he should not have been charged in the case.

Constand testified as a witness during the Motsinger trial, along with two other women who had accused Cosby of sexual assault.

After his release from prison, Cosby was the subject of a civil trial in 2022 brought by another accuser, Judy Huth. In that case, the jury sided with Huth and found that Cosby had sexually assaulted her in 1975, when as a 16-year-old girl she accepted his invitation to join him at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles.

Cosby had promoted the higher court decision in the Constand case as a full exoneration, an overstatement that has now been overshadowed by two civil court findings that reinforce an image of him as a person who wielded his celebrity to take advantage of women.

Since he left prison, Cosby has largely stayed out of the public eye. During a deposition in the Motsinger case last fall, he described the financial downturn he had experienced because he had been unable to get the high-profile work he once enjoyed as a comedy star whose “The Cosby Show” became a major television success.

“Due to allegations, whether they be newspaper, radio, television, magazines or just plain internet, I have not worked in about 10 years, or more,” he said in the deposition. He added, “That means I have not earned a cent through my being an entertainer, a writer, a television performer, except in reruns, and my net worth has gone down like a submarine with no motor.”

He has faced foreclosure on two New York properties and sold one of them, a Manhattan townhouse, last year for $28 million. He still owns another house in New York and also has homes in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.

Motsinger said in court papers that she met Cosby when she was a server in a restaurant called the Trident. Later, when she was on her way home, she said Cosby pulled up next to her and invited her to a stand-up act he was performing at the Circle Star Theater.

After collecting her in a limo, he gave her a glass of wine on the way, the papers said. In the theater dressing room, she began to feel sick and he gave her what she believed was aspirin. Moving in and out of consciousness, she said in the court papers, she remembered being put in a limo by two men with Cosby, only to later wake up in bed and recognize that she had been raped.

“She woke up in her house with all her clothes off, except her underwear on — no top, no bra, and no pants,” her lawyers wrote in court papers. “She knew she had been drugged and raped by Bill Cosby.”

In court papers, Cosby’s lawyer had challenged the accuracy of Motsinger’s recollection. Bonjean argued that Motsinger’s claims were time-barred and “based on nothing more than speculation and conjecture leaving no triable issues of material fact.”

Cosby has acknowledged decades of philandering, and to giving quaaludes to women as part of an effort to have sex. But he has said the women willingly took what they knew to be quaaludes. In this case, he said in the deposition that he recalled being in a limo with Motsinger and remembered wanting to have sex with her, but said that he could not remember whether they had sex.

“I cannot remember if I did or not,” he said in the deposition.

Jesse Creed, a lawyer for Motsinger, credited the outcome to her credibility as a witness and to the reforms to the statute of limitations in California that allowed the case against Cosby to be brought. “We started working on this case in 2023,” he said, “when the California Legislature revived the debt that he owed Ms. Motsinger.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.