Bill Cosby Testifies For 7 Hours In Boston As Cases Move Forward – Update

UPDATED 12:15PM Saturday:Bill Cosby’s sworn deposition lasted for seven hours Friday in the civil suit brought by a woman who claims the entertainer sexually abused her when she was 15, according to Gloria Allred who is representing Judy Huth.

Allred told reporters Saturday that she could not answer questions about Cosby’s testimony in Boston. “We’ll be filing motions with the court in connection with the deposition. We’ll also be seeking to take a further deposition of Mr. Cosby at a later date.”

Cosby’s attorneys could not be reached for comment, Reuters said.

PREVIOUSLY, 6:18PM Friday: Busy day for Bill Cosby, and not in a good way. Today he was compelled, for the first time in about a decade, to answer questions under oath about allegations he sexually assaulted a woman in 1974 at the Playboy Mansion, when she was a minor.

Meanwhile, a Massachusetts federal court today ixnayed (read the ruling here) his bid to get dismissed a libel lawsuit being brought against him by three other women, who also claim Cosby assaulted them, but who can’t sue him owing to statute of limitations. Tamara Green, Therese Serignese and Linda Traitz allege that “during the 1970’s [Cosby] met each Plaintiff and subsequently assaulted her.” They claim their reputations were damaged when Cosby representatives told news organizations their allegations are “fabricated.”

NBC Nightly News reported tonight Cosby had, in fact, been deposed, in a report that mostly was a plug for tonight’s Dateline special in which it gathered nearly half of the entertainer’s accusers. Twenty seven women were interviewed by Kate Snow about their accusations of harassment, drugging, groping and or rape against Cosby, spanning a period of decades. NBC telecast its Dateline special, in which it gathered together nearly half of the more than 55 women who have come forward with claims against Cosby of non-consensual sexual encounters.

In her civil case, Judy Huth claims Cosby molested her at the Playboy Mansion in 1974 when she was 15. Though the statute of limitations also has passed on Huth’s allegations, because she was a minor when she claims to have been assaulted, she still is able to file her case.

Based on the clips shown by NBC Nightly News, it did not appear viewers would learn much new information in tonight’s Deadline segment, with the 27 women mostly repeating their claims about Cosby that already have been covered by the media. But the optics are not good for Cosby’s team – more than two dozen women arranged dramatically in a TV studio, all facing Snow.

Cosby’s legal team has said repeatedly as these women have come forward that their client never has been charged with a crime. Ten years ago, Cosby acknowledged, under oath, he’d obtained sedative drugs and gave them to women with whom he wanted to have sex, but he said the drug-taking was consensual, as was the sex.

The earliest the media could learn details of the today’s deposition is December, after a Los Angeles Superior Court judge this week ordered testimony to be sealed until at least December 22. At that time a hearing will determine whether the arrangement would be made more permanent.

Cosby also faces ongoing action in the courts from former America’s Next Top Model judge Janice Dickinson who filed a defamation case in May over an assault that allegedly occurred in 1982. Here too, though the statue of limitations bounds any case over the assault, Dickinson says that The Cosby Show star has caused her personal and professional suffering when he “through an attorney, publicly branded her a liar” over the incident. Subsequent revelations this summer of that Cosby 2005 deposition in another case made public for the first time the actor’s admission that he did, as Dickinson and others have claimed, use sedative drugs to have sex with women.

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