Bill Cosby is facing another trial beginning this week in Los Angeles over accusations that he sexually assaulted a teenage girl in the 1970s.
Jury selection in the civil case is started Tuesday in LA Superior Court, and could last up to a week, a rep for Cosby said.
The fallen funnyman, who is 85 and legally blind, won’t be present in court for the proceedings, the spokesman said.
Opening arguments are expected to begin June 1, and the trial itself is expected to last around seven days.
The legal battle comes less than a year after Cosby was freed from prison when Pennsylvania’s highest court overturned his sexual-assault conviction in the drugging and molesting of Andrea Constand in 2004.
In the LA case, Cosby stands accused of sexually assaulting Judy Huth at the Playboy mansion in 1975, when she was 16 or 17 years old.
Huth had previously said the alleged incident happened in 1974, and Cosby’s team tried and failed to get the suit dismissed after she revised the timeline of her allegations.
“This is a trial by assassination of Mr. Cosby’s legacy and livelihood,” a spokesman said, adding that Cosby denies the allegations and believes he will be “vindicated” at trial.
Huth’s suit, which was filed in 2014 but repeatedly delayed, claims she and Samuelson met Cosby while he was filming a movie at Lacy Park in LA.
The women, minors at the time, said Cosby asked them how old they were during that initial meeting, and a few days later invited them to the mansion, warning them to pretend to be 19 if asked about their age.
Huth claims Cosby molested her at the mansion by “putting his hand down her pants, and then taking her hand in his hand and performing a sex act on himself without consent,” according to the original complaint.
Cosby, whose monumental fall from grace stunned America, had been in prison for more than two years when the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court overturned his indecent assault conviction in June 2021.
