SANTA MONICA, Calif. (AP) — A woman testified Friday that she was 14 when Bill Cosby took her into a movie set trailer in 1975, grabbed her so she could not move her arms, and kissed her.
“I was struggling to get away,” she said. “It was very shocking.”
The now 61-year-old woman first told her story in a public place during a Los Angeles County civil trial over Judy Huth’s lawsuit alleging that Cosby sexually assaulted her at the Playboy Mansion when she was 16 around the same time was old, in the spring of 1975.
The woman testified that she, her mother and other family members and friends were on the set of the film “Let’s Do It Again” starring Cosby and Sidney Poitier in Los Angeles, where Cosby invited her to be an extra after seeing her at had met a tennis tournament a few months earlier.
She said Cosby invited her alone to his trailer to help him straighten the bow tie he was wearing for a scene.
“He grabbed me right away,” she said. “He started kissing me, all over my face, tongue down my throat.”
When asked by Huth’s attorney, Nathan Goldberg, how tightly Cosby was holding her, she replied, “enough that I couldn’t escape.”
After about 30 seconds, she broke free and left.
Pictures of Cosby and the 14-year-old together at the tennis tournament were shown in court, with him smiling and putting his arms around her. Other photos were shown of Cosby and the girl with her family on the film’s set. Huth later met Cosby on another set of the same film.
Old photos from the mid-1970s emerged at the trial, one of the last remaining legal claims against Cosby after his Pennsylvania criminal conviction was thrown out and other lawsuits settled by his insurer. Earlier testimonies showed two photos of Cosby and Huth at the Playboy Mansion. Cosby has denied sexually assaulting Huth and his lawyer says the case involves her trying to make money from the pictures.
The woman who testified Friday said after exiting the trailer she did not tell anyone she was associated with Cosby, who is not attending the trial.
“It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” she says. “I didn’t want to ruin everything for everyone.”
They walked around the rest of the day performing in a boxing scene for the film, which was being filmed at the Grand Olympic Auditorium.
During her cross-examination of the woman, Cosby attorney Jennifer Bonjean showed a still from the film of the girl and her brother cheering in the front row next to the boxing ring.
Bonjean asked if she was upset at the time.
“It was probably me,” said the woman.
“Probably?” asked Bonjean.
“I was desperate when I was there,” she said.
The woman said she did not speak about the incident until she told her husband years later and her teenage daughter years later.
Bonjean asked if multiple media reports of allegations in 2015 about Cosby prompted her to come forward and tell her story to Gloria Allred, who, along with Goldberg, is representing both her and Huth.
The woman said a brief Allred clip prompted her to do so after hearing Cosby’s denial, but said she had no intention of filing a lawsuit when she sought out Allred.
The woman is not a party to the trial, but is allowed to testify with another woman about her experiences in the Huth case.
Bonjean seriously challenged the other witness, Margie Shapiro, who had told her story several times in the media and in a press conference with Allred.
Shapiro testified that in November 1975, at the age of 19, she was at the Playboy Mansion with Cosby when he gave her a pill, which she took voluntarily. She said she later woke up from unconsciousness to find that he had raped her.
Bonjean produced a document showing that Shapiro was scheduled to stand trial as a defendant the day she met Cosby while she was working at a donut shop near the set of another film he was working on.
“I might have gone,” Shapiro said. “If it had been necessary, I would have taken a short break.”
Bonjean also grilled Shapiro over a matchbook presented in court that Shapiro said she got at Cosby’s house when they stopped there briefly before heading to the mansion.
The matchbook read “11/18/1975, my evening at Bill Cosby’s”.
“After that drug sedation and rape, did you keep a souvenir?” Bonjean asked.
“It mattered whether it was good or bad,” Shapiro replied.
Bonjean also challenged Shapiro for her statement that she knew the pill Cosby gave her was not Quaalude, a tranquilizer popular in the 1970s, based on the coding engraved on it.
She pointed out that in a 2016 interview with police, she said the pill looked like a Quaalude and Cosby told her it was.
“Either I was wrong or the detective was wrong,” Shapiro said.
One of the jurors, many of whom were not born in the 1970s, raised his hand and asked the judge to clarify what a quaalude was. Shapiro compared it to Valium.
Shapiro said she angrily searched for Cosby’s house days later but couldn’t find it.
Bonjean asked if it was true that she was upset because Cosby refused to take her to the Playboy mansion and that she and Cosby had consensual sex at his house and her the way he treated her treated afterwards, didn’t like it.
“I was upset because he raped me,” she said.
The Associated Press does not typically name people who say they have been sexually abused unless they come forward publicly, as Huth and Shapiro have done on several occasions.
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Follow AP Entertainment writer Andrew Dalton on Twitter: https://twitter.com/andyjamesdalton