Bill Cosby has denied sexual abusing a teenager at the Playboy Mansion in the mid-1970s at a civil trial in Los Angeles.
At the end of the sixth day in the lawsuit, the 84-year-old actor and comedian was heard from for the first time.
In video testimony played for jurors on Wednesday, Mr Cosby denied sexually assaulting Judy Huth when she was 15 or 16 years old.
Ms Huth, now aged 64, is suing Mr Cosby in a trial which represents one of the last remaining legal claims against the actor after his Pennsylvania criminal conviction was thrown out by an appeals court last year, and his insurer settled many other lawsuits against his will.
Asked by an lawyer for Ms Huth on Wednesday whether he had tried to put his hand down Ms Huth’s pants, Mr Cosby quickly and clearly answered “no”.
Asked if he exposed himself and forced her to touch him sexually, Mr Cosby answered “no” in the same way.
Asked whether it was possible that these things happened but Mr Cosby did not remember them, Mr Cosby answered “no”.
The 84-year-old actor and comedian is not attending the trial due to glaucoma that has left him blind, his representatives said.
A judge also ruled that he could invoke his Fifth Amendment privilege and decline to testify or to give a second deposition in the case that the plaintiff had sought.
Mr Cosby also stated in the video that he did not remember meeting Ms Huth or her friend Donna Samuelson, who each testified earlier in the trial that they met him on a film set, then days later met up with him at a tennis club and briefly visited a house he was staying at then went with him to the mansion.Asked whether being shown pictures of himself with Ms Huth at the mansion would change his answers about whether he knew them, Mr Cosby replied that it would mean little.
“Why would that not be possible?” Ms Huth’s lawyer Nathan Goldberg asked.
“Because,” Mr Cosby replied, “the fact that this young lady is saying that she told me she was 15.”
In another clip shown in court, Mr Goldberg asked Mr Cosby if he would knowingly have relationships with girls who were under 18 in the mid-1970s.
Mr Cosby answers “no”. But he also says “no” when asked whether he would make sure those he sought sexual relationships with were 18.
“What is the word ‘know’, that I ‘know’ somebody?” Mr Cosby says in one of his few long replies in the video.
“Or that I met someone? Or that, while at Disneyland I met a hundred people and took pictures with them? Or that, while I’m at the airport (where) I’m sitting, waiting to catch a plane and people come up and sit next to me, sit on me, put your arm around me, say hello and take a picture that later might show up somewhere somehow and that I know this person? No, sir.”
Mr Cosby adds, “It doesn’t mean that they were with me or that I was even with them.”
Two pictures that Ms Samuelson took of Mr Cosby with Ms Huth at the mansion have been shown several times during the trial.
Mr Cosby’s lawyer Jennifer Bonjean has acknowledged that he took the girls there but repeatedly denied that any sexual interaction took place.
Ms Huth’s lawsuit states she suffered psychological damage from Mr Cosby’s abuse from 2014 when she began having anxiety over it and flashbacks to it, until 2018 when he was sent to prison in the Pennsylvania criminal case.
Mr Goldberg asked her on Wednesday: “Did you know when you were 16 that what Mr Cosby did caused you psychological injury?”
“No,” Ms Huth answered. “I was just a kid.”
Mr Cosby’s lawyers will begin calling their own witnesses on Thursday.
