Bill Cosby’s Lawyer Accuses Judy Huth of Inventing Her Assault Account

In withering cross-examination, Bill Cosby’s lawyer on Wednesday hammered Judy Huth on the question of why it had taken her decades to accuse the entertainer of sexually assaulting her at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles in 1975.

Ms. Huth, who sued Mr. Cosby in 2014, has testified in the civil case that, until she grew into adulthood, she did not recall the full trauma of the encounter she had with Mr. Cosby when she was 16. She has said she spent decades burying the painful memories and only told her father 30 years later.

But Jennifer Bonjean, a lawyer for Mr. Cosby, worked to persuade the jury in the Santa Monica courthouse that it was not shame but racism that had led her to be so reticent about her trip to the Playboy Mansion with a friend and Mr. Cosby.

“You didn’t tell anyone about it because Mr. Cosby is a Black man and that’s not OK in your community,” Ms. Bonjean said.

Ms. Huth, who lived in Temple City, Calif., at the time, said that wasn’t the case and that, in fact, some members of her family were Black.

The volleying over Ms. Huth’s motivations came on her third day on the stand in the trial where she is seeking damages on grounds that Mr. Cosby forced her to perform a sex act on him in an isolated bedroom at the mansion.

Though her account is of an assault that took place decades ago, and her suit would normally be time-barred, the law in California extends the period of time in which it’s possible to sue if someone was abused as a minor and only recognized the full impact of the encounter as an adult.

While Mr. Cosby’s team has attempted to discredit Ms. Huth’s recollection of what happened that day, the defense had not addressed the extent to which Mr. Cosby engaged in any kind of sex with Ms. Huth, except to describe her entire story as “a complete and utter fabrication.”

But in a video deposition played at the trial, Mr. Cosby denied having any sexual contact with Ms. Huth. He said he didn’t know her, couldn’t recall taking her to the Playboy Mansion and wouldn’t be able to recognize her.

The Cosby defense team has also argued that the trauma Ms. Huth has described suffering did not originate with Mr. Cosby, but grew out of any number of other painful episodes, including what she reported as being an encounter with a family member who tried to molest her as a young child.

In 2014, when Ms. Huth filed suit, many other women were coming forward with similar accusations of abuse against Mr. Cosby and Ms. Huth has testified that those multiple accounts and the fact that her own son had just turned 15, reminding her of when she was about that age, triggered her recollections.

Around the time she filed suit, she also reported her accusation to the police, but prosecutors declined to file criminal charges because, under criminal law, the statute of limitations had passed.

Ms. Bonjean accused Ms. Huth of pretending to have just suddenly realized the emotional damage caused by an event so many years earlier because that was what was required for her to qualify to file a lawsuit decades later.

“This whole story of your son turning 15 triggering your trauma was a pretext for bringing this lawsuit,” she said.

Ms. Bonjean has instead said that Ms. Huth was motivated by money and saw an opportunity to join others who were providing accounts of misconduct by Mr. Cosby at that time.

According to Ms. Huth, 64, she and a friend were invited by Mr. Cosby to join him at the Playboy Mansion several days after meeting him on a film set that they stumbled upon in a park not far from their homes. The friend, Donna Samuelson, testified at the trial and said Ms. Huth had confided in her that she had been assaulted that same night, but they agreed at that point to keep it a secret.

Mr. Cosby has denied the sexual assault and his lawyers have sought to undermine the credibility of Ms. Huth’s account, initially suggesting before trial that the two had met several years after Ms. Huth has said, when she was no longer a minor. During the trial, however, they have moved away from that point and argued that other parts of her account, such as the length of time — several hours — that she stayed at the mansion after what she described as a sexual assault, were inconsistent.

Mr. Cosby’s lawyers have also tried to show that any trauma she had experienced in her life was related to something other than her encounter with Mr. Cosby.

Going through her medical history in court, Ms. Bonjean showed that Ms. Huth had been prescribed antidepressants as early as 2011, and she said that Ms. Huth has discussed a history of abusive relationships and other episodes, any of which could have been the cause of her trauma. Ms. Huth’s lawyer countered that she was diagnosed with PTSD, and started suffering severe flashbacks, for the first time in 2014.

The trial comes a year after Mr. Cosby’s criminal conviction in the case of Andrea Constand was overturned on due process grounds. Ms. Constand was a former Temple University employee who said he sexually assaulted her when she was 30.

Mr. Cosby was asked in his video deposition, which was taken in 2015, whether or not in the 1970s he routinely asked women whether they were under 18 before he had sex with them, and he said no. But at the same time, he said that, were he to know, he would never go out with a minor.