April 13 – Cuba Gooding Jr. pleaded guilty on Wednesday to violently touching a woman at a New York nightclub in 2018, as part of a deal with prosecutors that spares the Oscar-winner any immediate prison sentence.
The guilty plea, in which Gooding also admitted in court to subjecting two other women to “non-consensual physical contact” in 2018 and 2019, came three years after his arrest, Manhattan prosecutors said in a statement.
Under the plea agreement, if Gooding, 54, continues to undergo court-ordered counseling for six months, he can withdraw his plea of misdemeanor and plead guilty to a lesser violation of harassment.
If he doesn’t comply, he faces up to a year in prison.
The actor was accused of molesting three different women at different Manhattan nightspots in 2018 and 2019. Read more
He pleaded guilty to the most serious charge of forcibly kissing a woman at a nightclub in September 2018, a district attorney’s spokesman said.
Actor Cuba Gooding Jr. appears before the New York State Supreme Court in the Manhattan borough of New York, United States, on October 31, 2019 for his indictment. Alec Tabak/Pool via REUTERS
Continue reading
“I apologize if I’ve ever felt inappropriately touched,” the New York Times quoted Gooding as saying in court as he pleaded guilty.
A representative and attorney for the actor could not be immediately reached for comment.
Gooding won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in the 1996 romantic comedy Jerry Maguire as a runaway football player who becomes his sports agent’s only client and demands that Tom Cruise “show me the money.”
Two decades later, Gooding portrayed OJ Simpson in the television miniseries The People v. OJ Simpson”.
Hours after the pleading, a Manhattan federal judge denied Gooding’s bid to dismiss a $6 million civil lawsuit brought by a woman who said Gooding twice raped her in 2013 at the Mercer Hotel in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood.
U.S. District Judge Paul Crotty said it didn’t take the woman too long to sue by waiting until 2020 to invoke a New York City law protecting victims of gender-based violence.
Gooding said a different law with a one-year statute of limitations should have applied. He has denied his accuser’s allegations.
Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; Additional reporting by Jonathan Stamp in sNew York; Edited by Steve Gorman, Richard Chang & Shri Navaratnam