Bill Cosby’s lawyers introduced a former National Enquirer reporter at a sexual assault trial in California on Friday to portray Judy Hughes’ encounter with Cosby at the Playboy Mansion. Claimed to be completely inconsistent with Mr. Hughes’ own explanation from the stand.
Hughes testified in court that Cosby took her hand and forced him to have sexual intercourse when she visited the mansion in 1975, when she was 16 years old.
However, reporter Robin Mizurahi said in a personal essay published in 2018 that Hughes, identified by the essay’s pseudonym, was too scared to touch Cosby in a 2005 interview. Have sexually acted on herself.
Cosby’s team argued that her testimony was inconsistent and too unreliable to justify being indemnified in the proceedings she filed against him, Hughes’s team. I raised a contradiction when trying to damage the credit of my account.
“This was based on what Judy told you,” Cosby’s lawyer Jennifer Bonjan told Mizrahi. “Judy told you she just saw.”
Sexual assault against Bill Cosby
After the 2018 criminal conviction for Bill Cosby’s sexual assault was overturned, the first civil lawsuit was filed accusing him of sexual misconduct.
However, defense witness Mizrahi said he could not guarantee the accuracy of the essay and tried to reconstruct the 2005 interview as memorable as possible, not from a simultaneous recording of their conversation. Said that he did.
“I made it out of memory,” she said. She said the quotes added to the remarks attributed to Mr Huth, identified as Debra in her passage, were included “for readability purposes”.
The The essay said The encounter took place in the 1980s, and Mizrahi admitted that he had made a mistake. “I obviously didn’t have all the facts right,” she said. “I didn’t feel that was the point of the story.”
When he was at the stand earlier this week, Hughes was asked to discuss the same quote suggesting that he described his encounter with Cosby in a very different way in 2005. Hughes denied the accuracy of Mizrahi’s essay.
“I swear to God that it’s a lie in my child’s life,” she said.
A citation debate arose when Mr. Cosby’s legal team introduced what was expected to be the final witness of the case. This will be discussed by the jury early next week.
A panel of twelve people sitting in the Santa Monica Courthouse is asked to provide their verdict based on the predominance of evidence. Unlike the unanimous requirements of criminal cases, only nine out of twelve must agree to a finding to reach a verdict.
Mizrahi said he wrote an essay for 2018 after leaving Enquirer because he wanted to focus on the power of Cosby’s celebrities. The previous article that Mizrahi was working on in 2005 and was interviewed by Hughes was not published. Mizrahi said Enquirer canceled the article after Cosby agreed to a full interview with the publication.
Huth contacted The Enquirer after reading another article about Cosby who questioned his behavior with women. When Mizrahi called her, her former reporter testified that she asked Hughes if she had evidence to support her account.
Hughes said he had a photo of himself with Cosby at the Playboy Mansion. Two photos of Mr. Cosby and Mr. Hughes were submitted together as evidence at the trial.
Cosby’s lawyer suggests that Hughes’s call to National Enquirer is evidence that she is trying to sell photos and make money. Huth denied that it was her motivation to move forward.
Mizrahi said that if the 2005 article had been published, Hughes would likely have been paid $ 7,000 to $ 8,000 for the photo. Efforts to reach the publication on Friday failed due to comments on Mizrahi’s testimony.
Last Friday, the defense introduced an expert witness who talked about how memory is contaminated and can be affected by other events, including media coverage. “Excessive negative media coverage can label people. That label influences how people remember their experiences, inflates them, and makes them more than they used to. It can look bad, “said Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, a psychology and law expert. “When people face the impossible, they often change their memory to make it meaningful,” she added.
Another witness to Mr. Cosby, psychologist Dr. Julie Brofko, testified later on Friday that she had seen Hughes and was unable to tie up the trauma. Encounter with Cosby.
“She has a long history of traumatic experiences,” she said. “These things could also be the cause of the symptoms she was experiencing at the time.”
