Bill Cosby faces another trial beginning this week in Los Angeles over allegations that he sexually assaulted a young girl in the 1970s.
Jury selection in the civil trial is expected to begin Tuesday in LA Superior Court and last up to a week, a Cosby representative told The Post on Sunday.
The fallen comedian, who is 85 and blind, will not attend the court hearing, the spokesman said.
The opening statements are expected to begin on June 1, and the process itself is expected to last about seven days.
The lawsuit comes less than a year after Cosby was released from prison when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court vacated his 2004 sexual assault conviction for drug abuse and molestation by Andrea Constand.
In the LA case, Cosby is 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 dismiss the lawsuit after revising the timeline of their allegations.
Bill Cosby will not attend his trial over allegations of sexually assaulting a teenager in the 1970s. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images
While Judge David Karlan would not dismiss the lawsuit, he ruled last week that Cosby’s attorney, Jennifer Bonjean Huth, and her friend Donna Samuelson could again dismiss Huth.
Samuelson was deposed on Friday and Huth will be deposed on Monday night, Cosby spokesman and crisis communicator Andrew Wyatt told The Post.
“This is a trial by murder of Mr. Cosby’s legacy and livelihood,” the spokesman said, adding that Cosby denies the allegations and believes he will be “rehabilitated” at the trial.
Judy Huth claims Cosby attacked her at the Playboy mansion in 1975 when she was 16 or 17 years old. AP/Anthony McCartney
Huth’s lawsuit, filed in 2014 but repeatedly delayed, alleges that she and Samuelson met Cosby while he was filming a movie in LA’s Lacy Park.
The women, then minors, said Cosby asked them how old they were at that first meeting and invited them to the mansion a few days later, warning them to pretend they were 19 if they were to asked about their age.
Huth alleges that 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.
Huth claims Cosby molested her in 1975 after the two met while he was filming a movie in LA’s Lacy Park.
“We obviously deny that Mr. Cosby did anything in the Playboy mansion that would constitute sexual battery,” Bonjean said last week.
John West, one of Huth’s attorneys, argued that his client’s claims still fall under the statute of limitations under California’s 2019 law, which allows victims to “look back” and complain about decades-old child sexual assault.
The judge in the case had previously ordered Playboy Enterprises to produce a list of employees dating back to the mid-1970s to see if any of them could testify about how visitor logs were kept during those years.
The judge asked Playboy Enterprises to provide a list of employees from the mid-1970s to support Huth’s story.Charley Gallay/Getty Images for Playboy
Cosby claims there is no evidence Huth was ever at the Playboy mansion.
Brass for Playboy told the judge Tuesday that they had already provided all of the information they were required to provide under Huth’s subpoena. The company also said it had no employees who could talk about how visitor logs were kept in the 1970s and that those logs, if they still exist, could be kept in Hugh Hefner’s estate.
Cosby, whose monumental fall from grace stunned America, had been in prison for more than two years when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court vacated his condition of indecent assault in June 2021.
Cosby and Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion on February 10, 2011 in Beverly Hills, California. Earl Gibson III/WireImage
The court said a decades-old agreement with then-Montgomery District Attorney Bruce Castor Jr. should have protected Cosby from being charged with allegedly assaulting Constand.
Constand first reported the alleged encounter to Castor in 2005, who did not press charges in the case.
Constand then sued Cosby in civil court, and the case was settled for an undisclosed sum.
During the civil trial, Castor and Cosby’s teams admitted they reached a behind-the-scenes verbal agreement that the actor should testify about Constand’s allegations — and Cosby would never face criminal charges in return.
Cosby spent two years in prison in 2004 for drugging and molesting another woman. Stephen Yang
Cosby admitted in the statement that he drugged Constand before performing a sexual act on her, although he said it was consensual. This testimony was later used in part to convict him.
“I think that Judy’s trial could be our last stand for justice and that our accountability comes into play in our fight against Bill Cosby,” Cosby’s accuser Victoria Valentino told the New York Times.
The jury in the Santa Monica courtroom will have the final say.