9 girls accused Invoice Cosby of sexual assault in a Nevada lawsuit on Wednesday, lower than two months after the state modified its statute of limitations for civil circumstances involving that crime.
The ladies mentioned within the lawsuit that the assaults occurred in Nevada between 1979 and 1992, some in Mr. Cosby’s resort suite in Las Vegas. They mentioned that Mr. Cosby, now 85, had drugged or tried to drug every of them earlier than the assaults.
A spokesman for Mr. Cosby, Andrew Wyatt, couldn’t instantly be reached for touch upon Wednesday evening. He instructed NBC Information that the plaintiffs within the case had been motivated by “habit to large quantities of media consideration and greed.”
The lawsuit is the most recent of a number of to accuse the entertainer of being a sexual predator. He was convicted of sexual assault in a Pennsylvania courtroom in 2018 and commenced serving a three- to 10-year sentence.
Mr. Cosby was launched in 2021 after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court docket overturned his conviction on the grounds that prosecutors had violated his rights by reneging on a promise to not cost him. Mr. Wyatt described the courtroom’s reversal on the time as a victory for each Black America and girls.
However accusations of sexual misconduct have continued to path Mr. Cosby, who starred for years in “The Cosby Present,” a mainstay of American tv within the Nineteen Eighties and early Nineties. And he now faces a number of new lawsuits in states the place the legal guidelines governing statutes of limitations have lately modified.
In California final 12 months, a jury sided with Judy Huth, who had accused Mr. Cosby of sexually assaulting her in 1975 on the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles, when she was 16. She was awarded $500,000.
Mr. Cosby was additionally sued in Los Angeles this month by Victoria Valentino, a former Playboy mannequin who accused him of drugging and sexually assaulting her in that metropolis in 1969, after she and a good friend met him for a meal in a restaurant.
The California circumstances had been potential as a result of state regulation has been modified since 2020 to increase, then briefly elevate, the statute of limitations for sexual assault filings in civil courts.
The same course of in New Jersey allowed Lili Bernard, an actor and visible artist, to sue Mr. Cosby in 2021, accusing him of drugging and sexually assaulting her at a resort in Atlantic Metropolis in 1990.
In Nevada, the state legislature handed a regulation in Could that revised provisions round some civil circumstances involving sexual assault. The regulation permits individuals who had been 18 or older when a sexual assault allegedly occurred to file civil lawsuits. Older state legal guidelines had already allowed individuals who had been underneath 18 on the time of an alleged sexual assault to convey such circumstances.
A number of the 9 girls who filed the lawsuit on Wednesday have been concerned in authorized motion in opposition to Mr. Cosby in different states.
One is Ms. Bernard, a former visitor star on “The Cosby Present.” One other is Janice Dickinson, a mannequin who appeared as a witness throughout Mr. Cosby’s Pennsylvania trial, testifying that he had drugged and sexually assaulted her in a Lake Tahoe resort room in 1982.
“Each state ought to observe Nevada’s lead and remove the statute of limitations for sexual assault,” mentioned Lisa Bloom, a lawyer who represented Ms. Dickinson within the Pennsylvania case. “I applaud the braveness of those girls for demanding justice in opposition to Invoice Cosby.”
