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      Woman Testifies R. Kelly Sexually Abused Her on Video When She Was 14

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      The woman testified at the singer’s federal trial in Chicago that she had been persuaded not to testify against him at his 2008 state trial, which ended in his acquittal.CHICAGO — In 2008, a jury in Chicago declared the singer R. Kelly not guilty of producing child sexual abuse imagery after seeing a videotape that prosecutors said showed the R&B singer engaging in sex acts with an underage girl. The defense team had argued that the identities of the people in the tape were in question, and several jurors said the lack of testimony from the victim was a significant barrier to convicting Mr. Kelly.But on Thursday, the woman at the center of the 2008 trial took the stand, identifying herself and Mr. Kelly as the people in the infamous video, saying that they had sex “hundreds” of times when she was underage, and explaining how two decades ago he had persuaded her to deny their relationship to law enforcement officials.“I was extremely scared that my parents would find out,” she said, adding that she was afraid of what would happen to Mr. Kelly.Mr. Kelly has been trailed by accusations of abusing young women and underage girls for more than two decades but had long avoided criminal punishment — until last year, when he was sentenced to 30 years in prison after he was convicted in federal court in Brooklyn of racketeering and sex trafficking charges.Before that, the 2008 trial was the closest Mr. Kelly had gotten to being held accountable.The woman at the center of that trial, now 37, took the stand at the Everett M. Dirksen U.S. Courthouse in downtown Chicago, where she said that she had been repeatedly sexually abused as a teenager by Mr. Kelly and testified that it was in fact her at age 14 appearing in the videotape, which at one point shows Mr. Kelly urinating on her.Testifying under a pseudonym for more than four hours on Thursday, the woman told the court that in 2002, after law enforcement officials had obtained the tape, Mr. Kelly sent her and her parents out of the country to make them inaccessible to investigators. He then urged her to deny to a grand jury that it was her on the tape and paid for a lawyer to accompany her, she said. She testified that she had falsely told the grand jury that it was not her on the videotape and that she was not sexually involved with Mr. Kelly. She said that she gave Mr. Kelly’s lawyers a necklace of hers that could be seen on the videotape.As the woman spoke, Mr. Kelly — who is facing charges of coercing minors into sex, receiving child sexual abuse videos and conspiring to obstruct justice — remained impassive.The woman told the jury that she was 13 years old when she was first introduced to Mr. Kelly by her aunt, a protégée of Mr. Kelly’s who goes by the stage name Sparkle. Mr. Kelly, who became the woman’s godfather, started speaking sexually with her over the phone, she said, then started abusing her physically. She testified that Mr. Kelly would sexually assault her at various locations, including his home, the recording studio and his tour bus.The tape surfaced after a journalist for The Chicago Sun-Times who had reported on the accusations against Mr. Kelly, Jim DeRogatis, received it in the mail from an anonymous sender, and turned it over to law enforcement. Mr. Kelly was charged in 2002 with producing child pornography, and he stood trial in 2008 but was acquitted.The woman testified that around the time of the trial, she was living with Mr. Kelly in his mansion, and that after he was acquitted, he began physically abusing her and controlling her ability to leave. He later helped her move into her own place and get a car, she said.A lawyer for Mr. Kelly, Jennifer Bonjean, who is expected to cross-examine the woman on Friday, sought to undermine her testimony in opening arguments, telling the jury that she has an immunity deal with prosecutors. The woman affirmed that in exchange for her testimony, prosecutors had granted her immunity from prosecution for perjury related to the false grand jury testimony in 2002.Prosecutors say that they now have more evidence of the woman’s abuse than the state prosecutors had 14 years ago. The 2008 trial focused on one video, but the current trial centers on four videos that prosecutors say show Mr. Kelly sexually abusing the woman. Those videos are the basis for charges against Mr. Kelly related to producing child pornography, as well as the ones related to receiving child pornography.According to the federal indictment, Mr. Kelly and his associates realized in 2001 that videotapes of him sexually abusing the woman were missing, and as a result, they began a multiyear effort to recover the tapes, paying one person hundreds of thousands of dollars to try to regain possession of them.Charges against two of Mr. Kelly’s associates, Derrel McDavid and Milton Brown, who are standing trial at the same time as Mr. Kelly, relate to accusations that they had tried to find the missing tapes. Both men pleaded not guilty, and their lawyers have argued that they were carrying out their jobs, unaware that Mr. Kelly was abusing children.Later on in the trial, four other women are also expected to testify that Mr. Kelly sexually abused them when they were girls. More

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      R. Kelly Stands Trial in Chicago: What to Know

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      The musician faces charges of sex crimes and of working to obstruct an earlier investigation that resulted in his acquittal in a 2008 criminal trial.R. Kelly, who was sentenced to 30 years in prison for racketeering and sex trafficking earlier this year, will stand trial again starting this week, beginning the next chapter of prosecutors’ efforts to hold him criminally responsible for allegations of sexual abuse dating back more than three decades.The trial is in Chicago, the city Mr. Kelly long called home, and where he faced his first criminal trial in 2008.This time, federal prosecutors are seeking to hold Mr. Kelly and his associates accountable for working to stymie the earlier trial, in which a jury acquitted Mr. Kelly of producing child sexual abuse imagery. They are accusing Mr. Kelly and a former employee who is also on trial, Derrel McDavid, of arranging hush money payments and seeking to conceal evidence that would have aided prosecutors when they were investigating the singer in the early 2000s.Mr. Kelly, 55, will face charges that he coerced five minors into sex acts, and several charges related to producing child sexual abuse imagery. He and Mr. McDavid also face charges of receiving child sexual abuse imagery, during what prosecutors have described as a scheme to recover missing tapes of Mr. Kelly having sex with minors.A third man — another former employee of Mr. Kelly’s, Milton Brown — is facing a related charge. All three men have pleaded not guilty.The trial will be an emotional moment for many in Chicago who have witnessed Mr. Kelly’s rise from a child of the city to a pop and R&B star, then his fall after he was accused of luring underage girls into his orbit.“Chicago has always struggled with this because he is local and we tend to go up for our locals,” said Mikki Kendall, a writer who grew up in the city and recalled, in the Lifetime documentary series “Surviving R. Kelly,” seeing the adult singer approaching teenage girls at a local McDonald’s. “There are people who are going to be very upset and will again try to insist that the girls are at fault, and there are going to be people — and I am one of them — who are going to say 59,000 times: He is a grown man preying on very young women and children.”The first public disclosure of abuse allegations came in a 1996 lawsuit, and a steady drip of legal claims and articles followed over the next two decades. The renewed effort to prosecute Mr. Kelly came in 2019, after the Lifetime documentary broadcast accounts of women who described being abused and controlled by him, oftentimes when they were teenagers.One year ago, Mr. Kelly stood trial in New York, where a jury found him guilty of leading a decades-long scheme to recruit women and underage girls for sex. He started serving his 30-year prison term in Brooklyn before he was transferred to a federal prison in Chicago for the current trial.What happened in the 2008 trial?The 2008 trial was a result of a 2002 grand jury indictment of Mr. Kelly on 21 counts of child pornography, which were later reduced to 14. The case took years to go to a jury. During that time, the singer debuted some of the biggest hits of his career, including “Ignition” and “Step in the Name of Love.”The trial revolved around a 27-minute tape that prosecutors said showed Mr. Kelly having a sex with a teenage girl and urinating on her. The case hinged on whether the jury was convinced that the people in the tape were who the prosecutors said they were. Mr. Kelly and the young woman denied they were the ones on the tape, and neither testified in the trial.A jury found Mr. Kelly not guilty on all charges, and after the verdict was released, jurors said the young woman’s refusal to testify was a significant barrier to convicting him.How is that relevant to the current trial?A portion of the trial will focus on charges that Mr. Kelly and his associate, Mr. McDavid, conspired to obstruct the previous federal investigation by paying off people with knowledge of Mr. Kelly’s abuse and seeking to suppress evidence.Prosecutors accuse Mr. Kelly of persuading the minor in the tape to deny to a grand jury in the early 2000s that she had a sexual relationship with Mr. Kelly and that it was her in the 27-minute video. According to the federal indictment, Mr. Kelly and Mr. McDavid arranged payments and bought gifts for the minor and her parents over a roughly 15-year period to prevent them from speaking to law enforcement about the abuse.These hush money payments were part of a broader effort, prosecutors say, to hide evidence of Mr. Kelly’s sexual abuse from investigators.In 2001, after state officials started investigating whether Mr. Kelly had been abusing the child at the center of the 2008 trial, Mr. Kelly and his associates realized that several videotapes of the singer sexually abusing minors had gone missing, according to the indictment in the case. After that realization, Mr. Kelly and Mr. McDavid started a multiyear effort to have those videos returned, paying an unnamed person hundreds of thousands of dollars to recover them, the indictment said.Around the time of the first trial in Chicago, prosecutors say, the person that Mr. Kelly and Mr. McDavid hired to find the missing videos planned a news conference about the existence of footage of Mr. Kelly having sex with minors. According to the indictment, Mr. Kelly, Mr. McDavid and others paid the person $170,000 to cancel it.The charges of receiving child sexual abuse imagery relate to the effort to recover several missing videos of Mr. Kelly engaging in sex acts with the person at the center of the 2008 trial.Who is expected to testify?Prosecutors have not revealed exactly who they will call to testify, but court papers suggest that they now have the cooperation of the woman whose testimony in 2008 was a missing piece of evidence in their case, as well as her mother.The indictment also suggests that prosecutors have the cooperation of four other people who say that Mr. Kelly coerced them into sex when they were underage, between 1996 and 2001.​​Judge Harry D. Leinenweber, who will preside over the case, recently ruled that any accusers called to testify will be able to do so using pseudonyms.A lawyer representing Mr. Kelly, Jennifer Bonjean, did not respond to requests for comment on the case. Mr. Kelly did not testify in the trial in Brooklyn.In a tweet last week, Ms. Bonjean wrote that it would be difficult to find 12 jurors who would be fair “given the media war on my client.”“The government starts with an incredible advantage but we are going to fight like hell to get a jury that will follow the law,” she wrote.How does the trial in Chicago differ from the one in Brooklyn?The trials are likely to be similar in that the centerpiece of the prosecutors’ case is testimony from people who say Mr. Kelly recruited them for sex, but the legal approaches are different.In Brooklyn, Mr. Kelly was convicted of one count of racketeering based on allegations that he was the ringleader of a criminal enterprise that had carried out acts of bribery, kidnapping and forced labor. He was also convicted of eight counts of violating the Mann Act, a sex trafficking statute.In the trial starting this week, which is in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, the charges are just as complex. Mr. Kelly faces five counts of coercing a minor into criminal sexual activity; four counts of doing so for the purpose of producing a video of the conduct; two counts of receiving child pornography; one count of conspiring to receive child pornography; and one count of conspiring to obstruct a federal investigation.One part of Mr. Kelly’s history that is not likely to be addressed is his illegal marriage to the singer Aaliyah when she was 15 and Mr. Kelly was 27. The marriage was central to the case against Mr. Kelly in Brooklyn, where a witness testified that Mr. Kelly sexually abused Aaliyah when she was only 13 or 14 years old. (Aaliyah died in a 2001 plane crash.)Mr. Kelly’s legal team asked the judge in the Chicago trial to exclude evidence related to the marriage, and prosecutors responded that they did not intend to introduce evidence on the subject.Is R. Kelly facing any other criminal charges?Yes. Mr. Kelly still faces sex crime charges in Illinois and Minnesota. After the federal trial in Chicago, those charges will be dealt with next. More

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      in Television

      Jerry Harris Sentenced to 12 Years for Sex Crimes Involving Minors

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      Mr. Harris, who shot to reality-TV fame in the Netflix documentary series “Cheer,” had pleaded guilty to federal charges related to soliciting child sexual abuse imagery and illegal sexual conduct with a minor.A judge in Chicago sentenced Jerry Harris, the Navarro College cheerleader who became a breakout star of the Netflix documentary series “Cheer,” to 12 years in prison on Wednesday on guilty pleas to two of seven federal charges related to sex crimes involving minors in February.Mr. Harris, 22, had reached a plea deal in February in which prosecutors agreed that after sentencing on the two counts — the charges that he persuaded a 17-year-old to send him sexually explicit photos for money and traveled to Florida “for the purpose of engaging in illicit sexual conduct” with a 15-year-old — they would ask that the remaining charges be dropped. He had initially pleaded not guilty to all seven charges in December 2020.Mr. Harris’s plea agreement noted that sentencing guidelines “may recommend 50 years in prison” for the offenses, though Judge Manish S. Shah had noted that he might decide differently. Judge Shah also ordered Mr. Harris to serve eight years of court-supervised release following his prison term.A lawyer for Mr. Harris, Todd Pugh, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.In a memo filed before the hearing, prosecutors had asked Judge Shah to sentence Mr. Harris to 15 years in prison, arguing that Mr. Harris took advantage of “his status as a competitive cheerleader, his social media persona, and eventually his celebrity and money, to persuade and entice his young victims to engage in sexually explicit conduct for him or with him.”Mr. Harris’s lawyers had requested a six-year prison term, to be followed by eight years of supervised release, arguing that Mr. Harris had himself been sexually abused as a child in the world of competitive cheerleading and therefore had a “skewed version of what he understood to be appropriate relationships.”The sentencing caps a case that began nearly two years ago in September 2020, when Mr. Harris was arrested and charged with production of child pornography, months after the release of “Cheer,” which follows a national champion cheerleading team from a small-town Texas community college.Around the same time, he was sued by teenage twin brothers who said he had sent sexually explicit messages to them, requested nude photos and solicited sex from them. (Mr. Harris befriended the boys when they were 13 and he was 19, USA Today reported.)In a voluntary interview with the authorities in 2020, Mr. Harris acknowledged that he had exchanged sexually explicit photos on Snapchat with at least 10 to 15 people he knew were minors and had sex with a 15-year-old at a cheerleading competition in 2019, according to a criminal complaint.After federal agents interviewed other minors who said they had had relationships with Mr. Harris, they filed additional felony charges against him. The charges that Mr. Harris did not plead guilty to as part of the agreement include four counts of sexual exploitation of children and one count of enticement. The seven charges involve five minor boys.Mr. Harris has been held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago since his arrest. More

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      in Television

      What Judy Huth Said Happened at the Playboy Mansion

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      Judy Huth, who is now 64, and a friend, Donna Samuelson, testified that in 1975 when they were teenagers they were invited by Mr. Cosby to join him at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles several days after meeting him on a film set in a park near their homes, where he was making a film, “Let’s Do It Again.”According to them, he invited them to his tennis club days later, and then took them to a house where he was staying, where they played a game in which they had to drink beer every time they lost at billiards. He then asked them to follow him in their car to the Playboy Mansion.“Are you girls ready for your surprise?” he said, according to Ms. Huth. “I had no clue what it could be,” Ms. Huth testified in court at the trial.During the trial, her lawyers showed the jury a photograph of Ms. Huth standing with Mr. Cosby in the game room at the mansion where they played arcade games and pinball, they said. It was taken by Ms. Samuelson, Ms. Huth told the court, 15 minutes before, she said, Mr. Cosby molested her.Mr. Cosby first put his hands on Ms. Samuelson’s shoulders, but she squirmed away, Ms. Samuelson said.Ms. Huth asked to use a bathroom, she said, and when she came out Mr. Cosby was sitting on a bed in an adjoining bedroom.“He patted the seat next to him,” she said. “I sat down. He tried to lean me back, he tried to kiss me, he tried to put his hands underneath my belly button where my high-waisted pants were.”To deflect him, Ms. Huth said, she told Mr. Cosby she was on her period. But then, she said, “he pulled his sweats down, grabbed my hand, put it over his hand, closed it” and forced her to perform a sex act on him.Mr. Cosby has denied that he sexually assaulted Ms. Huth, or any of the other women who have come forward in recent years to accuse him of sexual misconduct. In a video deposition taken in 2015, Mr. Cosby denied having any sexual contact with Ms. Huth, said that he didn’t know her and could not recall taking her to the Playboy Mansion.Mr. Cosby’s lawyer noted that Ms. Huth’s recollection of when the encounter took place had changed: While she initially said it happened in 1974, when she was 15, she more recently concluded it was in 1975, when she was 16.Mr. Cosby’s lawyers had argued that she had in fact been a willing visitor to the Playboy Mansion and noted that she did not flee after what she had described as a distressing encounter with Mr. Cosby but rather stayed on at the mansion for hours, swimming in the pool, ordering cocktails and mixing with celebrities.“Boy, did Judy and Donna enjoy themselves,” a lawyer for Mr. Cosby, Jennifer Bonjean, said, referring to Ms. Huth and her friend.Ms. Huth testified that she had been angry afterward and wanted to leave. Ms. Samuelson testified that she had persuaded Ms. Huth to stay to calm down. Ms. Huth agreed, she said, because Ms. Samuelson was the one who was driving.But even though they stayed, Ms. Huth said she was preoccupied, only going through the motions and thinking about what had happened in the bedroom. The two friends said that they left the mansion at about midnight and agreed to keep what had happened secret. More

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      in Movies

      Paul Haggis Arrested on Sexual Assault Charges in Italy

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      Haggis, who wrote and directed the Oscar-winning crime drama “Crash,” was accused of assaulting a woman in Ostuni over the course of two days.The Oscar-winning director and writer Paul Haggis was arrested on charges of aggravated sexual violence and aggravated personal injuries in the Southern Italian city of Ostuni on Sunday, according to the local police.According to a statement from the prosecutor’s office in the nearby city of Brindisi, which ordered the arrest, the accuser was not Italian. The statement identifies the man who was arrested as P.H., a Canadian; Vincenzo Leo, the duty officer of the local Italian police, confirmed it was Mr. Haggis.The statement said that after two days of “nonconsensual intercourse,” he had brought the woman to the Papola Casale airport in Brindisi on Friday and left her there “at the first lights of dawn, despite the precarious physical and psychological conditions of the woman.”The airport’s staff and the border police noticed her in the airport in a “confusional state,” assisted her and took her to the local police office, the statement continued. She was then brought to a hospital where she was treated following a protocol used in Italy for victims of violence against women; she subsequently reported the violence to the police.According to the accusations, Mr. Haggis, 69, “would have forced the young woman, that he had met some time before, to endure sexual intercourse.”“I am confident that all allegations will be dismissed against Mr. Haggis,” Priya Chaudhry, a lawyer for Mr. Haggis, said in an email. “He is totally innocent, and willing to fully cooperate with the authorities so the truth comes out quickly.”Mr. Haggis, who won a screenwriting Oscar in 2006 for the crime drama “Crash,” and who wrote acclaimed movies such as “Million Dollar Baby,” was in the southern city to attend the Allora film festival, where he was set to participate in panels and discussions with the audience, starting on June 21, according to the festival’s program.Mr. Haggis was sued for sexual assault in New York in 2017 by a publicist, Haleigh Breest. Ms. Breest accused Mr. Haggis of forcing her to give him oral sex before raping her after a premiere in 2013. Mr. Haggis has contended that the encounter with Ms. Breest was consensual.Following the lawsuit, which is still pending because of delays related to the coronavirus pandemic, three other women accused Mr. Haggis of sexually assaulting them, according to The Associated Press.A lawyer for Mr. Haggis, Christine Lepera, has denied the three other accusations, saying “he did not rape anybody,” according to The A.P.’s report.Mr. Haggis got his start as a TV writer in the 1980s and went on to help create several series, including “Walker, Texas Ranger,” the long-running drama starring Chuck Norris. But he is perhaps best known for his film work, notably “Crash,” the 2005 ensemble drama he directed and co-wrote. The film won best picture at the Academy Awards as well as best original screenplay for Mr. Haggis and Bobby Moresco.In 2009, Mr. Haggis left the Church of Scientology over its support of Proposition 8, the ban on same-sex marriage passed by California voters and later overturned. In a resignation letter that was circulated in Hollywood, Mr. Haggis wrote that the church’s position was “a stain on the integrity of our organization and a stain on us personally.” In the documentary “Going Clear” and elsewhere, Mr. Haggis has become among the more prominent critics of the church. And he has said that, in response, the church has mounted a campaign of harassment.In a court filing last year, Mr. Haggis asserted that the pending sexual assault lawsuit in New York had essentially frozen his career, leaving him unable to work as a director or producer.“I have had discussions with producers and financiers, but have been repeatedly told that they cannot work with me until I clear my name,” he wrote in the filing, which was submitted as part of a motion requesting that the court set a trial date.Stephanie Goodman contributed reporting. More

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      in Theater

      Kevin Spacey Charged With Sexual Assault in London

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      The actor will appear in a London court on Thursday to start what could be a lengthy trial process over multiple allegations of sexual assault.LONDON — The actor Kevin Spacey was charged with four counts of sexual assault on Monday in London, the city’s police force said in a news release.Mr. Spacey, 62, who was also charged with one count of causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without their consent, is scheduled to appear in court in London on Thursday where he will confirm his identity and that he understands the charges. A date for a full trial has not yet been announced.The offenses, which involve three men, are alleged to have occurred between March 2005 and April 2013, the police said in the news release. Mr. Spacey’s representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The British authorities last month authorized the indictments against Mr. Spacey, which only took effect when Mr. Spacey traveled to England to be formally charged.Mr. Spacey told ABC News’s “Good Morning America” that he denied the charges and would travel to Britain to defend himself. “While I am disappointed with their decision to move forward, I will voluntarily appear in the U.K. as soon as can be arranged and defend myself against these charges, which I am confident will prove my innocence,” he said in a statement to the show.The charges detailed in the news release relate to incidents alleged to have taken place in London and in Gloucestershire, England. They date from the time when Mr. Spacey was the artistic director of the Old Vic theater in London, the playhouse he led from 2003 to 2015.The first person to publicly accuse Mr. Spacey, a two-time Academy Award winner, of sexual misconduct was the actor Anthony Rapp, who said in 2017 that Mr. Spacey made unwanted sexual advances toward him at a New York party in 1986, when he was 14 years old.Soon after Mr. Rapp’s allegations appeared in an article published by BuzzFeed, multiple men who worked with Mr. Spacey at the Old Vic also accused him of inappropriate behavior. An independent investigation, commissioned by the theater, said that Mr. Spacey’s “stardom and status” might have stopped people from raising accusations when they occurred. The investigators’ report added that they could not independently verify the allegations, and Mr. Spacey did not participate. More

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      in Movies

      Harvey Weinstein Facing Indecent Assault Charges in Britain

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      British prosecutors said they authorized criminal charges against Mr. Weinstein for an incident in 1996.The British authorities have authorized criminal charges against Harvey Weinstein on two counts of indecent assault against a woman in 1996 in London, the country’s Crown Prosecution Service announced in a news release Wednesday.Mr. Weinstein, 70, has been convicted of felony sex crimes in New York and is awaiting trial in Los Angeles, where he has been charged with several counts of forcible rape, among other charges.“Charges have been authorized against Harvey Weinstein, 70, following a review of the evidence gathered by the Metropolitan Police in its investigation,” Rosemary Ainslie, the head of the prosecution service’s special crime division, said in a statement.The Metropolitan Police said in a statement that it had gathered evidence in the case, and that Mr. Weinstein was being accused of two counts of indecent assault in London in August, 1996, against a woman who is now in her 50s. Earlier this month a New York appeals court upheld Mr. Weinstein’s 2020 conviction on felony sex crimes, increasing the likelihood that he would serve a significant portion of his 23-year sentence. A lawyer for Mr. Weinstein said at the time that his legal team would ask the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, to review the decision.Mr. Weinstein must be formally charged at a police station in England or Wales, said David Lindsell, a spokesman for the prosecution service. He declined to comment on the possibility of extradition.A lawyer for Mr. Weinstein, Barry Kamins, declined to comment.A spokesman for the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, Greg Risling, said that Mr. Weinstein would have to stand trial in California before any potential extradition to Britain to face the charges there.Mr. Weinstein was a powerful Hollywood film producer until his downfall in 2017, when The New York Times reported allegations that he had sexually abused women over the course of nearly three decades. In the aftermath, dozens of women came forward to accuse Mr. Weinstein of sexual misconduct or assault; he maintained that he had only engaged in consensual sexual activity.The accusations spurred an international reckoning around sexual assault and harassment, with women in many fields coming forward with public allegations against high-profile men in what became known as the #MeToo movement. In 2018, Mr. Weinstein was arrested in New York City on sex crime charges. He stood trial in 2020, and a jury found him guilty of two felonies — a criminal sexual act in the first degree and third-degree rape — and acquitted him on two charges of predatory sexual assault.In Los Angeles, Mr. Weinstein was indicted on charges that he sexually assaulted several women in separate incidents between 2004 and 2013. He was transferred to California to face the charges and pleaded not guilty. This is the second time in recent weeks that prosecutors in Britain announced that they had authorized criminal charges against a prominent figure from the American entertainment industry accused of sexual misconduct. Last month, the Crown Prosecution Service said it had authorized charges against the actor Kevin Spacey on four counts of sexual assault against three men. Mr. Spacey said that he would voluntarily travel to Britain to face the charges. More

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      Woman Testifies That Bill Cosby Kissed Her When She Was 14

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      She testified at a civil trial in Los Angeles brought by another woman accusing Mr. Cosby of sexual assault. A spokesman for Mr. Cosby denied all the accusations against him.Kimberly Burr testified Friday that she was 14 years old when Bill Cosby invited her into his trailer on a film set in Los Angeles in 1975 and started kissing her.Ms. Burr was testifying in the civil trial in Los Angeles where Mr. Cosby has been sued by another woman, Judy Huth, who has accused Mr. Cosby of sexually assaulting her that same year, when she was also a teenager.Ms. Burr, who is now 61, said that she had met Mr. Cosby at a tennis tournament in Palm Desert that year, where he had invited her to the set of the film “Let’s Do It Again” in Los Angeles with the promise of being an extra. While her mother and other members of her family waited outside, she said, he led her into his trailer to help him fix his bow tie, where he grabbed both her arms and started kissing her.“I was stuck,” Ms. Burr told the court. “I was struggling, trying to get away.”When he let go, she said, she “walked right out of the trailer down the steps” and didn’t tell her family because she didn’t want to ruin the day for them.During cross-examination, Jennifer Bonjean, a lawyer for Mr. Cosby, challenged her account, asking how, after such a traumatic experience, she could have kept photographs in the family home of the meeting showing Ms. Burr and her brother with Mr. Cosby. “Did it bother you that they were there?” she said.A spokesman for Mr. Cosby, Andrew Wyatt, dismissed the testimony. “These are just allegations made up to support Judy Huth, whose claims are not factual at all,” he said in an interview.Ms. Huth’s case is the first civil suit accusing Mr. Cosby of sexual assault to reach trial. In her lawsuit, Ms. Huth says that she was sexually assaulted by Mr. Cosby at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles in 1975, when she was 16, after she and a friend met him in a park where he was filming “Let’s Do It Again,” the same movie he was working on when he met Ms. Burr.The Sexual Assault Cases Against Bill CosbyAfter Bill Cosby’s 2018 criminal conviction for sexual assault was overturned, the first civil case accusing him of sexual misconduct has reached trial.The Civil Trial: Judy Huth has accused Mr. Cosby of assaulting her as a teenager. She sued in 2014, but the case had been on hold while he was criminally prosecuted.Criminal Conviction: In 2018, a jury found the disgraced entertainer guilty of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand at his home near 14 years earlier,His Release From Prison: After the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned the conviction, Mr. Cosby was released from prison on June 30, 2021.The Ruling: The conviction was overturned on the grounds that prosecutors violated Mr. Cosby’s rights by reneging on a promise not to charge him.Days after their meeting, Mr. Cosby invited Ms. Huth and her friend to his tennis club, Ms. Huth’s lawyers have said, where Ms. Huth played a game where she had to drink alcohol every time he won at billiards, and then they both followed him in their car to the Playboy Mansion. Once there, Ms. Huth has said, Mr. Cosby forced her to perform a sex act on him in a bedroom.Mr. Cosby has denied he sexually assaulted Ms. Huth, or any of the other women who have come forward in recent years to accuse him of sexual misconduct.More than 50 women have accused Mr. Cosby of sexually abusing them. This was the first time Ms. Burr has spoken publicly.As Ms. Huth’s lawyers have sought to demonstrate a pattern of behavior and abuse by Mr. Cosby, they called another witness, Margie Shapiro, 65, who had already come forward with accusations in 2015.Ms. Shapiro testified that she was 19 in 1975 when Mr. Cosby met her at the doughnut shop where she was working and invited her to the set of another movie he was filming in Los Angeles. Later that day, they went to the Playboy Mansion, where, she said, he drugged and assaulted her. She said that they had played pinball together in the game room at the mansion, and that he had offered her a pill after she lost. She said she remembered waking up: “My next memory was foggy, but I was in a bed naked and Bill Cosby was naked, inside me,” she said.She said she told a friend what had happened but never went to the police. “I felt I went there consensually, I took a pill and he’s him and I am me,” she said. “I felt stupid because I felt at the time I put myself in that situation.”Mr. Cosby’s spokesman, Mr. Wyatt, issued a statement Friday afternoon which said that the accusers were “discrediting themselves” and questioned their accounts. “Since we stand on the foundation of truth and facts,” he said in the statement, “we believe that Mr. Cosby will be vindicated of ALL allegations in order to move forward with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”In challenging Ms. Shapiro’s account in court, Mr. Cosby’s legal team questioned whether she was working at the doughnut shop on the morning she said she met Mr. Cosby, and whether she went to the Playboy Mansion. They acknowledged that Ms. Shapiro went to Mr. Cosby’s house, but they insisted that the relationship was consensual. Ms. Shapiro said she stood by her account.Mr. Cosby’s lawyers have noted in court proceedings that Ms. Huth’s recollection of when her encounter took place has changed: While she initially said it happened in 1974, when she was 15, she more recently concluded it was in 1975, when she was 16. The law in California classified a 16-year-old as a minor. In disputing Ms. Huth’s account, Mr. Cosby’s lawyers have suggested they met years after the time she said they did, when she was no longer a minor.In their opening remarks, his lawyers sought to discredit Ms. Huth’s account by pointing out that she and the friend who accompanied her to the Playboy Mansion stayed for hours after the alleged encounter with Mr. Cosby, swimming in the outdoor pool and watching a movie.The friend, Donna Samuelson, has testified that Ms. Huth was distraught and wanted to leave but Ms. Samuelson persuaded her to stay.Ms. Huth’s lawsuit, which she filed in 2014, had largely been put on hold while prosecutors in Pennsylvania pursued Mr. Cosby criminally on charges that he sexually assaulted Andrea Constand.Mr. Cosby’s 2018 conviction in that case was overturned last year by an appellate court, which ruled that a non-prosecution agreement he made with a previous prosecutor meant that Mr. Cosby should not have been charged in the case. Mr. Cosby walked free after serving nearly three years of a three- to 10-year sentence.Mr. Cosby, 84, is not scheduled to testify and has not attended the opening days of testimony, but his deposition testimony is expected to be played in court.Ms. Huth, 64, who has been in attendance, is intending to give her account to the jury. More