Woman testifies that Bill Cosby kissed her when she was 14

Kimberly Burr testified Friday that she was 14 when Bill Cosby invited her into his trailer on a Los Angeles movie set in 1975 and began kissing her.

Ms Burr testified at the civil trial in Los Angeles where Mr Cosby was sued by another woman, Judy Huth, who has accused Mr Cosby of sexually assaulting her the same year when she was also a teenager.

Ms Burr, now 61, said she met Mr. Cosby at a tennis tournament in Palm Desert that year, where he invited her to the set of the film Let’s Do It Again in Los Angeles with a promise to be an extra. While her mother and other family members waited outside, he led her into his trailer to help him fix his bow tie, where he grabbed both of their arms and began kissing them.

“I was stuck,” Ms Burr told the court. “I was fighting and trying to get away.”

When he let go, she said, “she walked straight out of the trailer down the steps” and didn’t tell her family because she didn’t want to ruin their day.

During cross-examination, Jennifer Bonjean, an attorney for Mr. Cosby, questioned her account and asked how she could have preserved photos of the meeting at the family home, showing Ms. Burr and her brother with Mr. Cosby, after such a traumatic experience . “Did it bother you that they were there?” she said.

A spokesman for Mr. Cosby, Andrew Wyatt, denied the statement. “These are just allegations made to support Judy Huth, whose allegations are not factual at all,” he said in an interview.

Ms. Huth’s case is the first civil lawsuit accusing Mr. Cosby of sexual assault to go to trial. In her lawsuit, Ms. Huth says she was sexually assaulted by Mr. Cosby in 1975 at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles when she was 16 after she and a friend met him at a park, where he said “Let’s Do It.” was shooting Again, the same film he was working on when he met Ms. Burr.

Days after their meeting, Mr Cosby invited Ms Huth and her friend to his tennis club, Ms Huth’s lawyers said, where Ms Huth played a game that required her to drink alcohol every time he won at billiards, and then they both followed him in her car to the Playboy Mansion. Once there, Mrs. Huth said, Mr. Cosby forced her to perform a sexual act on him in a bedroom.

Mr Cosby has denied he sexually assaulted Ms Huth or any of the other women who have come forward to accuse him of sexual misconduct in recent years.

More than 50 women have accused Mr Cosby of sexually abusing them. This was the first time Ms Burr has spoken publicly.

When Ms Huth’s lawyers sought to establish a pattern of behavior and abuse by Mr Cosby, they called another witness, Margie Shapiro, 65, who had previously made allegations in 2015.

Ms Shapiro testified that she was 19 in 1975 when Mr Cosby met her at the donut shop where she worked and invited her to the set of another film he was shooting in Los Angeles. Later that day, they went to the Playboy Mansion, where she said he had drugged and assaulted her. She said that they played pinball together in the mansion’s game room and that he offered her a pill after she lost. She said she remembers waking up: “My next memory was foggy, but I was lying naked in a bed and Bill Cosby was naked in me,” she said.

She said she told a friend what happened but never went to the police. “I felt like I went there consensually, I took a pill and he’s him and I’m me,” she said. “I felt stupid because that’s how I felt at the time I put myself in this situation.”

Mr Cosby’s spokesman, Mr Wyatt, issued a statement Friday afternoon saying accusers were “self-discrediting” and questioning their accounts. “As we stand on the basis of truth and fact,” he said in the statement, “we believe Mr. Cosby will be vindicated in ALL allegations to move forward with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

In challenging Ms Shapiro’s portrayal in court, Mr. Cosby’s legal team questioned whether she worked at the donut shop the morning she said she met Mr. Cosby and whether she went to the Playboy Mansion . They acknowledged that Ms Shapiro went to Mr Cosby’s house but insisted the relationship was amicable. Ms Shapiro said she stands by her account.

Mr Cosby’s lawyers have determined in court proceedings that Ms Huth’s recollection of the time of their encounter has changed: while she originally said it happened in 1974 when she was 15, she recently concluded that it was 1975 was when she was 16. California law classified a 16-year-old as a minor. In challenging Ms Huth’s portrayal, Mr Cosby’s lawyers have suggested they met years after she said they did, when she was no longer a minor.

In their opening statement, his attorneys attempted to discredit Ms. Huth’s portrayal by pointing out that she and the boyfriend who accompanied her to the Playboy Mansion spent hours swimming in the outdoor pool and watching a movie after the alleged encounter with Mr. Cosby.

The friend, Donna Samuelson, has testified that Ms Huth was desperate and wanted to leave, but Ms Samuelson persuaded her to stay.

Ms. Huth’s lawsuit, which she filed in 2014, had been mostly stayed while Pennsylvania prosecutors prosecuted Mr. Cosby for sexually assaulting Andrea Constand.

Mr Cosby’s 2018 conviction in that case was overturned last year by an appeals court, which ruled that a non-prosecution agreement he had with a previous prosecutor meant Mr Cosby would not have been charged in the case allowed to. Mr Cosby walked free after serving almost three years of a three to 10 year sentence.

Mr Cosby, 84, is not due to testify and did not attend the opening days of testimony, but his testimony is expected to be presented in court.

Ms Huth, 64, who was present, intends to testify before the jury.