Jurors at a civil trial found that Bill Cosby sexually abused a 16-year-old girl at the Playboy Mansion in 1975. The Los Angeles County jury delivered the verdict in favor of Judy Huth, now 64, and awarded her $500,000. She said the fact that jurors believed her story meant more than the sum of money or the fact that she didn’t win punitive damages, the Associated Press reports. “It’s been torture,” Huth said of the seven-year legal fight. “To be ripped apart, you know, thrown under the bus and backed over. This, to me, is such a big victory.” Jurors found that Cosby intentionally caused harmful sexual contact with Huth, that he reasonably believed she was under 18, and that his conduct was driven by unnatural or abnormal sexual interest in a minor. The decision is a major defeat for the 84-year-old entertainer once hailed as America’s dad.
It comes nearly a year after his Pennsylvania criminal conviction for sexual assault was thrown out and he was freed from prison. Huth’s lawsuit was one of the last remaining legal claims against him after his insurer settled many others against his will. Cosby did not attend the trial or testify in person, but short clips from a 2015 video deposition were played for jurors, in which he denied any sexual contact with Huth. He continues to deny the allegation through his attorney and publicist. Huth filed her lawsuit in 2014, saying that her son turning 15 — the age when she went to the mansion — and a wave of other women accusing Cosby of similar acts brought fresh trauma over what she had been through as a teenager.