Bill Cosby’s defense team introduced a former reporter from The National Enquirer at his sexual assault trial in California on Friday, arguing that the reporter’s depiction of Judy Huth’s encounter with Mr. Cosby at the Playboy Mansion starkly contradicted Ms. Huth’s own account from the stand.
Ms. Huth testified at the trial that Mr. Cosby took her hand and forced her to perform a sex act on him during a visit to the mansion in 1975, when she was 16.
But the reporter, Robin Mizrahi, in a personal essay published in 2018, said that Ms. Huth, identified by a pseudonym in the essay, had said in a 2005 interview that she was too scared to touch Mr. Cosby and had only watched as he performed a sex act on himself.
Mr. Cosby’s team put forward the discrepancy as it tried to discredit Ms. Huth’s account, arguing that she has been inconsistent and too unreliable in her testimony to warrant being awarded damages in the lawsuit she has filed against him.
“This was based on what Judy told you,” Jennifer Bonjean, a lawyer for Mr. Cosby, said to Ms. Mizrahi. “Judy told you she just watched.”
The Sexual Assault Cases Against Bill Cosby
After Bill Cosby’s 2018 criminal conviction for sexual assault was overturned, the first civil case accusing him of sexual misconduct has reached trial.
But Ms. Mizrahi, a witness for the defense, said she could not vouch for her essay’s accuracy, saying she had tried to reconstruct the 2005 interview to the best of her recollection, not from any contemporaneous notes of their conversation.
“I crafted it out of memory,” she said. She said that quotation marks she had added to remarks attributed to Ms. Huth, identified as Debra in the passage, were included “for readability purposes.”
The essay said the encounter had happened in the 1980s, and Ms. Mizrahi conceded there were errors. “I obviously didn’t have all the facts right,” she said. “I didn’t feel it was the point of the story.”
During her time on the stand earlier this week, Ms. Huth had been asked to discuss the same quote that suggested she had described her encounter with Mr. Cosby very differently in 2005. Ms. Huth denied the accuracy of Ms. Mizrahi’s essay.
“I swear to God, on my kids’ life, that is a lie,” she said.
The arguments over the quotation came as Mr. Cosby’s legal team introduced what are expected to be the final witnesses in the case, which is expected to go to the jury for deliberations early next week.
The 12-person panel, sitting in a courthouse in Santa Monica, will be asked to provide its verdict based on a preponderance of the evidence. Only nine of the 12 will have to agree on a finding to reach a verdict, unlike the unanimity required in a criminal case.
Ms. Mizrahi said she wrote the 2018 essay after she left The Enquirer because she wanted to draw attention to Mr. Cosby’s celebrity power. The earlier article that Ms. Mizrahi was working on in 2005, for which Ms. Huth was interviewed, was never published. Ms. Mizrahi said The Enquirer canceled the article after Mr. Cosby agreed to a full interview with the publication.
Ms. Huth contacted The Enquirer after reading another article about Mr. Cosby that questioned his conduct with a woman. When Ms. Mizrahi called her back, the former reporter testified that she asked Ms. Huth whether she had any evidence to support her account.
Ms. Huth said she had photographs of herself with Mr. Cosby at the Playboy Mansion. Two photographs of Mr. Cosby and Ms. Huth together have been entered into evidence at the trial.
Mr. Cosby’s lawyers have suggested that Ms. Huth’s call to The National Enquirer is evidence that she was looking to make money by selling the photographs. Ms. Huth has denied that was her motivation for coming forward.
Ms. Mizrahi said Ms. Huth would likely have been paid between $7,000 and $8,000 for the photographs if the 2005 article had been published. Efforts to reach the publication on Friday for comment on Ms. Mizrahi’s testimony were unsuccessful.
Earlier Friday, the defense introduced an expert witness who spoke about how memories can be contaminated and also influenced by other events, including media coverage. “Excessive negative media coverage is likely to attach a label to a person. That label can affect how people remember their own experiences and inflate them to make them seem more bad than they were,” said Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, an expert on psychology and law. “When people get confronted with impossibilities, they often change their memories to make it make sense,” she added.
Another witness for Mr. Cosby, Dr. Julie Brovko, a psychologist, testified later on Friday that she had examined Ms. Huth and could not connect the trauma Ms. Huth said she was feeling in 2014, when she filed her lawsuit, with her encounter with Mr. Cosby.
“She has a long history of traumatic experiences,” she said. “Those things could also be the cause of the symptoms she was experiencing at the time.”
