Five women who have long accused Bill Cosby of sexually assaulting them early in his career have filed the latest lawsuit against the 85-year-old comedian, naming NBCUniversal, a studio and production company complicit in the abuse .
The lawsuit comes more than a year after Cosby left prison after his 2018 sexual assault conviction was overturned in Pennsylvania. This year, a Los Angeles jury awarded $500,000 to a woman who said Cosby sexually assaulted her at the Playboy Mansion in 1975 when she was a teenager.
The lawsuit, filed Monday under New York’s year-long adult window to file sex abuse complaints, involves accusers Lili Bernard, Eden Tirl, Jewel Gittens, Jennifer Thompson and Cindra Ladd. The lawsuit alleges that each woman was abused or assaulted by the actor after meeting him on set or in other entertainment circles from the late 1960s to the 1990s.
“It was common knowledge that Bill Cosby regularly took young women into his dressing room and if you read the complaint you will see that there were instances where staff observed this and even encouraged the plaintiff to comply,” he said attorney Jordan Rutsky, who represents all five women.
“It was no hidden secret that Bill Cosby did these things,” Rutsky said. “It was just accepted.”
The lawsuit alleged that NBC, Kaufman Astoria Studios and Carsey-Werner Television “facilitated the sexual assault of women” by failing to review Cosby’s power and inclinations and failing to protect the women from being alone with him because they were of benefited from his work.
In at least some of the cases, the lawsuit states, Cosby first drugged the woman with drinks or pills he provided. A Cosby spokesman, Andrew Wyatt, said “prosecutors have resurfaced to file a frivolous civil lawsuit against Cosby.”
A spokeswoman for NBCUniversal, the network that aired The Cosby Show from 1984 to 1992, said the company would not comment on legal issues. Neither Kaufman Astoria nor Carsey-Werner immediately returned the phone or email messages left Tuesday afternoon for comment.
“This is not about justice for victims of alleged sexual assault, this is about money,” Wyatt said in a statement, echoing the defense arguments in Cosby’s retrial when the Pennsylvania jury found him guilty of drug abuse and sexual assault on a Temple University staffer convicted at his home in the Philadelphia area in 2004.
Cosby served nearly three years in prison before the state Supreme Court overturned the conviction, noting that he had made incriminating statements in a testimony about the encounter only after he believed he had immunity from prosecution. The trial judge and an intermediate appeals court had found no evidence of such immunity.
Bernard, who played Mrs Minifield on The Cosby Show in the early 1990s, also has a pending lawsuit against Cosby in New Jersey over an alleged encounter in Atlantic City.
Seven other accusers received a settlement from Cosby’s insurers after being convicted in Pennsylvania of a defamation lawsuit they filed in Massachusetts. Her lawsuit said that Cosby and his agents slandered her by dismissing her allegations of abuse.