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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 Music

      U.S. Orchestras Playing More Works by Women and Minorities, Report Says

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      The recent discussions over racial justice and gender disparities appear to have accelerated efforts to bring more diversity to classical music.American orchestras have long fallen short when it comes to performing compositions by women and people of color, sticking to a canon of music dominated by white, largely male composers.But the protests over racial justice and gender disparities in the United States appear to have prompted some change.Compositions by women and people of color now make up about 23 percent of the pieces performed by orchestras, up from only about 5 percent in 2015, according to a report released on Tuesday by the Institute for Composer Diversity at the State University of New York at Fredonia.The increase comes amid a concerted effort in the performing arts to promote music by women and people of color, prompted in part by the #MeToo movement and the death of George Floyd.“The change that has been talked about for a very long time has suddenly been tremendously accelerated,” Simon Woods, president and chief executive of the League of American Orchestras, which helped produce the report, said in an interview.The coronavirus pandemic, which posed a threat to many institutions, seems to have also contributed to the change. Before the pandemic started, many ensembles took a more traditional approach to programming, planning their seasons years in advance. The virus has appeared to have led to experimentation.“The pandemic has been kind of a jolt to the patterns that we’ve known for so long,” Woods said, allowing orchestras “to be much more responsive.”Over all, ensembles seem to be embracing more music written by contemporary artists. This season, works by living composers made up about 22 percent of the pieces performed by orchestras, compared with 12 percent in 2015. The report was based on data from hundreds of orchestras across the United States.Many ensembles in recent years have taken steps to nurture the composing careers of women and people of color. The New York Philharmonic, for example, in 2020 started Project 19, a multiyear initiative to commission works from 19 female composers to honor the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which brought women the right to vote.While orchestras have shown a greater willingness to program works by living composers in recent years, several obstacles remain, including that some new music is performed only once.The League of American Orchestras, aiming to make works by living composers a more permanent part of the orchestral landscape, announced an initiative last month to enlist 30 ensembles in the next several years to perform new pieces by six composers, all of them women. More

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      in Movies

      Emma Thompson and the Challenge of Baring All Onscreen at 63

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      It’s the shock of white hair you notice first on Emma Thompson, a hue far more chic than anything your average 63-year-old would dare choose but one that doesn’t ignore her age either. It’s accompanied by that big, wide smile and that knowing look, suggesting both a wry wit and a willingness to banter.And yet, Thompson begins our video call by MacGyvering her computer monitor with a piece of paper and some tape so she can’t see herself. “The one thing I can’t bear about Zoom is having to look at my face,” she said. “I’m just going to cover myself up.”We are here across two computer screens to discuss what is arguably her most revealing role yet. In the new movie “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” directed by Sophie Hyde, Thompson is emotionally wrought and physically naked, and not in a lowlight, sexy kind of way.Thompson plays Nancy, a recently widowed, former religious schoolteacher who has never had an orgasm. At once a devoted wife and a dutiful mother harboring volumes of regret for the life she didn’t live and the dull, needy children she raised, Nancy hires a sex worker — a much younger man played by relative newcomer Daryl McCormack (“Peaky Blinders”) — to bring her the pleasure she’s long craved. The audience gets to follow along as this very relatable woman — she could have been your teacher, your mother, you — who in Thompson’s words “has crossed every boundary she’s ever recognized in her life,” grapples with this monumental act of rebellion.“Yes, she’s made the most extraordinary decision to do something very unusual, brave and revolutionary,” Thompson said from her office in North London. “Then she makes at least two or three decisions not to do it. But she’s lucky because she has chosen someone who happens to be rather wise and instinctive, with an unusual level of insight into the human condition, and he understands her, what she’s going through, and is able gently to suggest that there might be a reason behind this.”Daryl McCormack and Thompson in “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” which the screenwriter Katy Brand wrote with the actress in mind.Searchlight PicturesThompson met the challenge with what she calls “a healthy terror.” She knew this character at a cellular level — same age, same background, same drive to do the right thing. “Just a little sliver of paper and chance separates me from her,” she quipped.Yet the role required her to reveal an emotional and physical level of vulnerability she wasn’t accustomed to. (To ready themselves for this intimate, sex-positive two-hander that primarily takes place in a hotel room, Thompson, McCormack and Hyde have said they spent one of their rehearsal days working in the nude.) Despite a four-decade career that has been lauded for both its quality and its irreverence and has earned her two Academy Awards, one for acting (“Howards End”) and one for writing (“Sense and Sensibility”), Thompson has appeared naked on camera only once: in the 1990 comedy “The Tall Guy,” opposite Jeff Goldblum.She said she wasn’t thin enough to command those types of skin-baring roles, and though for a while she tried conquering the dieting industrial complex, starving herself like all the other young women clamoring for parts on the big screen, soon enough she realized it was “absurd.”“It’s not fair to say, ‘No, I’m just this shape naturally.’ It’s dishonest and it makes other women feel like [expletive],” she said. “So if you want the world to change, and you want the iconography of the female body to change, then you better be part of the change. You better be different.”For “Leo Grande,” the choice to disrobe was hers, and though she made it with trepidation, Thompson said she believes “the film would not be the same without it.” Still, the moment she had to stand stark naked in front of a mirror with a serene, accepting look on her face, as the scene called for, was the most difficult thing she’s ever done.“To be truly honest, I will never ever be happy with my body. It will never happen,” she said. “I was brainwashed too early on. I cannot undo those neural pathways.”She can, however, talk about sex. Both the absurdities of it and the intricacies of female pleasure. “I can’t just have an orgasm. I need time. I need affection. You can’t just rush to the clitoris and flap at it and hope for the best. That’s not going to work, guys. They think if I touch this little button, she’s going to go off like a Catherine wheel, and it will be marvelous.”Several women have written screenplays for Thompson. That’s because “she always somehow feels like she’s on your side,” Brand said.Charlotte Hadden for The New York TimesThere is a moment in the movie when Nancy and Leo start dancing in the hotel room to “Always Alright” by Alabama Shakes. The two are meeting for a second time — an encounter that comes with a checklist of sexual acts Nancy is determined to plow through (pun intended). The dance is supposed to relieve all her type-A, organized-teacher stress that’s threatening to derail the session. Leo has his arms around her neck, and he’s swaying with his eyes closed when a look crosses Nancy’s face, one of gratitude and wistfulness coupled with a dash of concern.To the screenwriter, Katy Brand, who acted opposite Thompson in the second “Nanny McPhee” movie and who imagined Thompson as Nancy while writing the first draft, that look is the point of the whole movie.“It’s just everything,” Brand said. “She feels her lost youth and the sort of organic, natural sexual development she might have had, if she hadn’t met her husband. There is a tingling sense, too, not only of what might have been but what could be from now on.”Brand is not the first young woman to pen a script specifically for Thompson. Mindy Kaling did it for her on “Late Night,” attesting that she had loved Thompson since she was 11. The writer Jemima Khan told Thompson that she had always wanted the actress to be her mother, so she wrote her a role in the upcoming film “What’s Love Got to Do With It?”“I think the thing that Emma gives everybody and what she does in person to people, and also via the screen, is that she always somehow feels like she’s on your side,” Brand said. “And I think people really respond to that. She will meet you at a very human level.”The producer Lindsay Doran has known Thompson for decades. Doran hired her to write “Sense and Sensibility” after watching her short-lived BBC television show “Thompson” that she wrote and starred in. The two collaborated on the “Nanny McPhee” movies, and are working on the musical version, with Thompson handling the book and co-writing the songs with Gary Clark (“Sing Street”).Thompson in “Nanny McPhee Returns.” She’s at work on a musical version of the franchise.Liam Daniel/Universal PicturesTo the producer, the film is the encapsulation of a writer really understanding her actress.“It felt to me like Katy knew the instrument, and she knew what the instrument was capable of within a few seconds,” Doran said. “It isn’t just, over here I’m going to be dramatic. And over here, I’m going to be funny, and over here I’m going to be emotional. It can all go over her face so quickly, and you can literally say there’s this feeling, there’s this emotion.”Reviewing “Leo Grande,” for The New York Times, Lisa Kennedy called Thompson “terrifically agile with the script’s zingers and revelations,” while Harper’s Bazaar said Thompson was “an ageless treasure urgently overdue for her next Oscar nomination.”The obvious trajectory for a film like this should be an awards circuit jaunt that would probably result in Thompson nabbing her fifth Oscar nomination. But the film, set to debut on Hulu on Friday, will not have a theatrical release in the United States.Thompson doesn’t mind. “​​It is a small film with no guns in it, so I don’t know how many people in America would actually want to come see it,” she said with a wink.That may be true. But more consequently, because of a rule change by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that reverts to prepandemic requirement of a seven-day theatrical release, “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” is not eligible for Oscar consideration, a reality that the director Sophie Hyde is not pleased with.“It’s really disappointing,” Hyde said. “I understand the desire to sort of protect cinema, but I also think the world has changed so much. Last year, a streaming film won best picture.” She argued that her film and others on streaming services aren’t made for TV. They are cinematic, she said, adding, “That’s what the academy should be protecting, not what screen it’s on.”Thompson, for one, seems rather sanguine about the whole matter. “I think that, given the fact that you might have a slightly more puritanical undercurrent to life where you are, that it might be easier for people to share something as intimate as this at home and then be able to turn it off and make themselves a nice cup of really bad tea,” said Thompson, laughing. “None of you Americans can make good tea.” More

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      in Theater

      Shauneille Perry Ryder, Pioneering Theater Director, Dies at 92

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      As a Black woman, she blazed a path Off Broadway with an intuitive grasp of “how a story should be told, particularly a Black story,” Giancarlo Esposito said.Shauneille Perry Ryder, an actress, playwright and educator who was one of the first Black women to direct plays Off Broadway, most notably for the New Federal Theater, died on June 9 at her home in New Rochelle, N.Y. She was 92.Her daughter Lorraine Ryder confirmed the death.Ms. Perry Ryder, who was known professionally as Shauneille (pronounced shaw-NELL) Perry, directed 17 plays at the New Federal Theater from 1971 to 2006, each a part of the company’s mission to integrate artists of color and women into mainstream American theater. The theater, founded in 1970 by Woodie King Jr. in Lower Manhattan and now housed on West 42nd Street, has been a mecca for Black actors and directors.“She was personable with actors, but she put her foot down,” Mr. King said in a phone interview, referring to her attention to detail. “I’m so glad she worked with New Federal. She gave us a great reputation. In our first 10 years, we had a hit each year, and at least three or four were directed by Shauneille Perry.”In 1982, she directed Rob Penny’s “Who Loves the Dancer,” about a young Black man (played by Giancarlo Esposito) growing up in 1950s Philadelphia who dreams of becoming a dancer but who is trapped by his mother’s expectations, his environment and racism.In The New York Times, the critic Mel Gussow wrote that the play “has an inherent honesty, and in Shauneille Perry’s production, the evening is filled with conviction.”Mr. Esposito, who had been directed earlier that year by Ms. Perry Ryder in another play, “Keyboard,” at the New Federal, recalled her “very intuitive expression of how a story should be told, particularly a Black story.”“I was a young, green actor who had chops,” he added, in a phone interview, “but she taught me that acting is physical. The explosion that comes out of me in the second act came together under her direction.”Ms. Perry Ryder also directed Phillip Hayes Dean’s “Paul Robeson,” which traces the life of the titular singer and social crusader; “Jamimma,” by Martie Evans-Charles, about a young woman who changes her name because of its connection to servility and who is devoted to a man who she is told will never do much more than “wear rags or play instruments”; and “Black Girl,” by J.E. Franklin, about three generations of Black women, including a teenager who yearns to dance.“If you’re Black, you know about these people in any city,” Ms. Perry Ryder told The Times in 1971, referring to the characters in “Black Girl.” “We are all a part of each other.”She won at least two Audelco Awards from the Audience Development Committee, which honors Black theater and artists, and in 2019 received the Lloyd Richards Director’s Award from the National Black Theater Festival, in Winston-Salem, N.C., named after the Tony-winning director of many of August Wilson’s plays.Shauneille Gantt Perry was born on July 26, 1929, in Chicago. Her father, Graham, was one of the first Black assistant attorneys general in Illinois; her mother, Pearl (Gantt) Perry, was a pioneering Black court reporter in Chicago. Lorraine Hansberry, who wrote “A Raisin the Sun,” was one of Shauneille’s cousins.While attending Howard University — where she received a bachelor’s degree in drama in 1950 — Ms. Ryder Perry belonged to a student theater group, the Howard Players, which performed Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck” and Strindberg’s “Miss Julie” on a tour of Scandinavia at the invitation of the Norwegian government. “We were the only Black company to tour those marvelous countries,” she told The Record of Hackensack, N.J., in 1971.She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1952 at the Goodman School of Drama at the Art Institute of Chicago (now a part of DePaul University). As a Fulbright scholar in 1954, she studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Dissatisfied with the curriculum, however (“they were always doing ‘Cleopatra,’” she said), she transferred to the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art.Back in Chicago she began acting — she was in a summer stock play, “Mamba’s Daughters,” with Ethel Waters — while also writing for the Black newspaper The Chicago Defender. In 1959, while on a trip to Paris that she had won through an Ebony magazine essay contest, she met the author Richard Wright, who, she recalled, asked her, “They still lynching people back in the States?”“I remember telling him, ‘They do it a little differently there today,’” she told The Times in 1971. But the next day she read about a Black man who had been accused of rape and taken forcibly to a jail cell; his body was later found floating in a river. “I kept wondering to myself,” she said, “‘What is that man saying about my analysis of things?’”And she wondered what she would do when she got home.At first she continued acting. She appeared in various Off Broadway plays, including Josh Greenfeld’s “Clandestine on the Morning Line” (1961), with James Earl Jones, in which a pregnant young woman (Ms. Perry Ryder) from Alabama strolls into a restaurant looking for the father of her child.Edith Oliver, reviewing the play in The New Yorker, praised Ms. Perry Ryder’s “lovely performance,” writing that she gave her role “such quiet, innocent strength and apparent unawareness of the character’s pathos that we almost forget it, too.”Frustrated with the roles she was offered, Ms. Perry Ryder turned to directing, first at the Negro Ensemble Company in New York, with a workshop production of Ms. Franklin’s “Mau Mau Room.”“I got the feeling that maybe there’s a place for me,” she told The Times.Two years later, she directed “The Sty of the Blind Pig” for the Negro Ensemble Company. In the drama, a blind street singer in 1950s Chicago goes to a house on the South Side looking for a woman he once knew.Emory Lewis wrote in his review in The Record that Ms. Perry Ryder “had marshaled her actors with loving attention to period detail and nuance.”Ms. Perry Ryder, left, in 1971 while directing “Black Girl,” a play by J. E. Franklin, right, about three generations of Black women. Produced by the New Federal Theater, it was staged at the Theater de Lys on Christopher Street in Lower Manhattan. Bert Andrews Her theater work continued for more than 40 years, including writing and directing “Things of the Heart: Marian Anderson’s Story,” about the brilliant Black contralto; directing and rewriting the book for a 1999 revival of “In Dahomey,” the first Broadway musical, originally staged in 1903, written by African Americans; and writing a soap opera for a Black radio station in New York City.In 1986, Ms. Perry Ryder joined the faculty of Lehman College in the Bronx, where she taught theater and ran the drama program. At Lehman, she staged “Looking Back: The Music of Micki Grant,” a revue based on Ms. Grant’s theatrical works, which include “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope.” She retired in 2001.In addition to Lorraine Ryder, Ms. Perry Ryder is survived by two other daughters, Gail Perry-Ryder Tigere and Natalie Ryder Redcross, and four grandchildren. Her husband, Donald Ryder, an architect, died in 2021. More

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      in Television

      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

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      in Movies

      Johnny Depp’s Win in Court Could Embolden Others, Lawyers Say

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      The actor’s victory against his ex-wife Amber Heard in one of the highest profile defamation cases to go to trial could inspire others to try their luck with juries.As the #MeToo movement fueled a public airing of sexual assault and misconduct allegations, defamation lawsuits quickly became a tool for both the accused and accusers to seek retribution and redemption.Men accused of misconduct have increasingly turned to defamation suits to try to clear their names, as have victims accused of making false allegations. But between the high costs of lawyers’ fees and the fears of revealing embarrassing details in open court, many such cases are settled before they ever reach trial.The bitter legal battle between the actor Johnny Depp and his ex-wife Amber Heard was closely watched in part because it was one of the highest-profile defamation cases to make it to trial recently, and several lawyers said that Mr. Depp’s victory in a Virginia court on Wednesday — when he was awarded more than $10 million in damages — could embolden others accused of abuse or misconduct to try their luck with juries, despite the real risks of airing dirty laundry in public.Ugly charges of physical abuse and lurid testimony came to define the Depp-Heard trial, which included one line of questioning about actual dirty laundry: the couple’s fierce argument over how the sheets in a Los Angeles penthouse where they were staying had become befouled. But the jury found in the end that Ms. Heard had defamed Mr. Depp in a 2018 op-ed in The Washington Post in which she referred to herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.”“Some people will definitely look at this as a playbook for suing your accuser,” said Charles Tobin, a First Amendment lawyer who practices in Fairfax, Va., where the trial played out over six weeks, and who briefly represented the former employer of a witness called in the Depp case. The proceedings were broadcast and livestreamed far beyond the walls of the courtroom.The $10.35 million award to Mr. Depp was offset by a $2 million partial victory for Ms. Heard, who countersued Mr. Depp for defamation after a lawyer representing him made several statements to a British tabloid calling her abuse accusations a “hoax.” The jury did not find two of those statements defamatory, but found that a third — in which the lawyer had accused Ms. Heard of damaging the couple’s penthouse and calling 911 “to set Mr. Depp up” — did defame her.Mr. Depp praised the verdict, saying that “the jury gave me my life back,” while Ms. Heard described it as “heartbreaking.”The outcome differed from that of a case in Britain, where a judge had ruled two years ago that there was evidence that Mr. Depp had repeatedly assaulted Ms. Heard. That ruling came in a libel suit that Mr. Depp had filed after The Sun, a British tabloid newspaper, called him a “wife beater” in a headline. While Britain is sometimes considered hospitable to libel cases, the judge who heard that case, Andrew Nicol, found that there was sufficient proof to conclude that most of the assaults Ms. Heard described had occurred, and he determined that what the newspaper had published was “substantially true.”Several high-profile defamation cases in recent years have been settled before they reached trial. In 2019, seven women who had accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault, and then sued him for defamation after they were accused of lying, settled their claims; a spokesman for Mr. Cosby said that his insurance company had decided to settle the cases without his consent. And the casino mogul Steve Wynn recently agreed to a settlement of a defamation suit he had filed against the lawyer Lisa Bloom, who said she would retract a statement accusing him of inappropriate behavior involving a client.In the wake of the Depp verdict, several lawyers and legal experts said, people accused of assault and misconduct may now be more inclined to try to bring defamation cases to trial. And some advocacy organizations and lawyers worry that the case could have a chilling effect on the victims of domestic violence or sexual abuse, adding to their fears that they could be punished for speaking out.“I do think that well-resourced individuals who feel slighted by speech that embarrassed or criticized them in some way may feel emboldened by this verdict,” said Nicole Ligon, a First Amendment law professor who provides pro bono legal advice for people considering going public with sexual misconduct accusations. “I imagine part of the reason they’ll feel emboldened is beyond the verdict itself but the public reaction to it.”The trial was captured by two cameras in the courtroom that allowed the testimony to be packaged into memes and online commentary — much of which mocked Ms. Heard’s accusations of abuse. In an interview with NBC’s “Today” show on Thursday, one of Ms. Heard’s lawyers, Elaine Charlson Bredehoft, said that the cameras had turned the trial into a “zoo.”Before the trial, Ms. Bredehoft had sought to persuade the judge to block cameras from the courtroom, arguing that Ms. Heard would be describing incidents of alleged sexual violence and predicting that “anti-Amber” networks would take statements out of context and play them repeatedly.“The potential for saturation of an unsequestered jury is a tremendous risk in this case,” Ms. Bredehoft argued, according to a court transcript from February.Judge Penney S. Azcarate ordered that cameras be allowed, maintaining that Ms. Bredehoft’s argument about victims of sexual offenses would only pertain to criminal trials. The judge suggested that allowing cameras could make the make the courthouse “safer” by giving a broader audience of viewers access to the case remotely.Mr. Depp may have won a victory in court, but it may take more than that to revive his career, or for Walt Disney Studios, which has cast Mr. Depp in several starring roles, to get back into business with him.The studio declined to comment, but two Disney executives privately pointed to his box office track record as the primary reason: None of his Disney movies have succeeded outside of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise since “Alice in Wonderland” in 2010. “Alice Through the Looking Glass” was a misfire in 2016, taking in 70 percent less than its predecessor worldwide. “The Lone Ranger” was a big-budget bomb in 2013. Except as Captain Jack Sparrow in the “Pirates” films, he has not been a box office draw recently.Johnny Depp’s Libel Case Against Amber HeardCard 1 of 7In the courtroom. More

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      Johnny Depp-Amber Heard Verdict: The Actual Malice of the Trial

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      In this post-#MeToo moment, misogyny and celebrity go hand in hand.The Johnny Depp-Amber Heard defamation trial was, from gavel to gavel, a singularly baffling, unedifying and sad spectacle. Now that it has ended with the jury finding in favor of Depp on all questions and in favor of Heard on only one, it’s clear that the confusion was the point.Why did Depp, who had already lost a similar case in Britain, insist on going back to court? A public trial, during which allegations of physical, sexual, emotional and substance abuse against him were sure to be repeated, couldn’t be counted on to restore his reputation. Heard, his ex-wife, was counting on the opposite: that the world would hear, in detail, about the physical torments that led her to describe herself, in the Washington Post op-ed that led to the suit, as “a public figure representing domestic abuse.”Even before the verdict came in, Depp had already won. What had looked to many like a clear-cut case of domestic violence had devolved into a “both sides” melodrama. The fact that Heard’s partial victory, which involved not Depp’s words but those spoken in 2020 by Adam Waldman, his lawyer at the time, can be spun in that direction shows how such ambiguity served Depp all along. As one commenter on The New York Times site put it, “Every relationship has its troubles.” Life is complicated. Maybe they were both abusive. Who really knows what happened? The convention of courtroom journalism is to make a scruple of indeterminacy. And so we found ourselves in the familiar land of he said/she said.The Depp-Heard trial was a singularly baffling, unedifying and sad spectacle, both inside the courtroom and out. Craig Hudson/Associated PressWe should know by now that the symmetry implied by that phrase is an ideological fiction, that women who are victims of domestic violence and sexual assault have a much harder time being listened to than their assailants. I don’t mean that women always tell the truth, that men are always guilty as charged, or that due process isn’t the bedrock of justice. But Depp-Heard wasn’t a criminal trial; it was a civil action intended to measure the reputational harm each one claimed the other had done. Which means that it rested less on facts than on sympathies.In that regard, Depp possessed distinct advantages. He isn’t a better actor than Heard, but her conduct on the stand was more harshly criticized in no small part because he’s a more familiar performer, a bigger star who has dwelled for much longer in the glow of public approbation. He brought with him into the courtroom the well-known characters he has played, a virtual entourage of lovable rogues, misunderstood artists and gonzo rebels. He’s Edward Scissorhands, Jack Sparrow, Hunter S. Thompson, Gilbert Grape.We’ve seen him mischievous and mercurial, but never truly menacing. He’s someone we’ve watched grow up, from juvenile heartthrob on “21 Jump Street” to crusty old salt in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise. His offscreen peccadilloes (the drinking, the drugs, the “Winona Forever” tattoo) have been part of the pop-cultural background noise for much of that time, classified along with the scandals and shenanigans that have been a Hollywood sideshow since the silent era.Depp is someone audiences have watched grow up onscreen, in movies like (clockwise from top left) “Edward Scissorhands,” “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,” “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”Clockwise from top left: 20th Century Studios; Paramount Pictures, via RGR Collection/Alamy; Universal Pictures, via TCD and Prod.DB/Alamy; Disney, via Moviestore Collection Ltd/AlamyIn his testimony, Depp copped to some bad stuff, but this too was a play for sympathy, of a piece with the charm and courtliness he was at pains to display. That he came off as a guy unable to control his temper or his appetites was seen, by many of the most vocal social media users, to enhance his credibility, while Heard’s every tear or gesture was taken to undermine hers. The audience was primed to accept him as flawed, vulnerable, human, and to view her as monstrous.Because he’s a man. Celebrity and masculinity confer mutually reinforcing advantages. Famous men — athletes, actors, musicians, politicians — get to be that way partly because they represent what other men aspire to be. Defending their prerogatives is a way of protecting, and asserting, our own. We want them to be bad boys, to break the rules and get away with it. Their seigneurial right to sexual gratification is something the rest of us might resent, envy or disapprove of, but we rarely challenge it. These guys are cool. They do what they want, including to women. Anyone who objects is guilty of wokeness, or gender treason, or actual malice.Of course there are exceptions. In the #MeToo era there are men who have gone to jail, lost their jobs or suffered disgrace because of the way they’ve treated women. The fall of certain prominent men — Harvey Weinstein, Leslie Moonves, Matt Lauer — was often welcomed as a sign that a status quo that sheltered, enabled and celebrated predators, rapists and harassers was at last changing.A few years later, it seems more likely that they were sacrificed not to end that system of entitlement but rather to preserve it. Almost as soon as the supposed reckoning began there were complaints that it had gone too far, that nuances were being neglected and too-harsh punishments meted out.This backlash has been folded into a larger discourse about “cancel culture,” which is often less about actions than words. “Cancellation” is now synonymous with any criticism that invokes racial insensitivity, sexual misbehavior or controversial opinions. Creeps are treated as martyrs, and every loudmouth is a free-speech warrior. Famous men with lucrative sinecures on cable news, streaming platforms and legacy print publications can proclaim themselves victims.Johnny Depp’s Libel Case Against Amber HeardCard 1 of 7In the courtroom. More

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      What to Know About Bill Cosby’s Civil Trial on Sexual Assault Accusation

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      Ms. Huth has sued Mr. Cosby, asserting that he sexually assaulted her in the 1970s when she was a teenager.Bill Cosby is being sued by Judy Huth in civil court in Los Angeles. The trial started Wednesday after a jury was selected last week.Ms. Huth has accused Mr. Cosby, 84, of sexually assaulting her as a teenager and sued him in 2014. But the civil suit was largely put on hold while Mr. Cosby was being criminally prosecuted in another case where he was accused of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand.Mr. Cosby’s criminal conviction in the Constand case in Pennsylvania was overturned last year by an appellate court, and he was freed from prison.Ms. Huth’s case is being followed by some of the many women who have accused Mr. Cosby of sexual misconduct, in part because it is the first civil case accusing Mr. Cosby of sexual assault to reach trial.Mr. Cosby has denied sexually abusing Ms. Huth and the other women who have made that accusation against him, suggesting any sexual encounters were consensual.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 now 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.What does Ms. Huth say happened?In court papers, Ms. Huth says that she and a friend met Mr. Cosby in 1975 when they wandered onto a movie set in a park in San Marino, Calif., where Mr. Cosby was shooting a film.Days later, at his invitation, they went to his tennis club, she says in court papers, where he gave her and her friend alcohol before taking them to the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles. There, Ms. Huth says in her lawsuit, he forced her to perform a sex act on him in a bedroom. She says Mr. Cosby tried to put his hand down her pants and then forced her to fondle him.What does Mr. Cosby say?Mr. Cosby acknowledges meeting with Ms. Huth at the Playboy Mansion but denies her allegation of sexual battery and has challenged her contention that she was a minor at the time.His lawyers have pointed out in court proceedings that Ms. Huth’s recollection regarding when the encounter occurred has changed. She initially said that it had happened in 1974, when she was 15. But more recently she concluded that it was actually in 1975, when she was 16, according to court papers. The law in California, then and now, holds that a 16-year-old is classified as a minor, but Mr. Cosby has contended that he did not meet Ms. Huth until several years later.Why is this a civil trial?In 2014, when she filed the civil case, Ms. Huth also reported her accusation to the police. But the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office declined to file criminal charges because the statute of limitations had passed.Ms. Huth was able to file a lawsuit because under California law, in some cases, the statute of limitations can be extended for adults who contend they were victims of sexual abuse as children but repressed the experience.In 2020, California law was amended to further extend the statute of limitations for sexual assault filings in civil court.Is Mr. Cosby facing other civil suits?The civil case is one of the last unsettled lawsuits against Mr. Cosby.He has already faced multiple other civil cases filed against him by women, many of whom sued him for defamation after his legal team dismissed as fictions their accusations of sexual misconduct by him. Eleven civil cases ended in settlements, with 10 of the settlements having been agreed to by Mr. Cosby’s former insurance company over his objections, according to his spokesman.Mr. Cosby also settled a civil case Ms. Constand brought against him in 2006 for $3.4 million.One other ongoing civil case was filed last year by Lili Bernard, an actor and visual artist, who accused him of drugging and sexually assaulting her at a hotel in Atlantic City in 1990, when she was 26. Mr. Cosby has denied her account. The Bernard case is still in its early stages.Why was Mr. Cosby released from prison?Mr. Cosby was found guilty in 2018 of drugging and sexually assaulting another woman, Andrea Constand, at his home near Philadelphia and was given a three to 10 year sentence in state prison.But that conviction was overturned last year on due process grounds. An appeals court ruled that a “non-prosecution agreement” with a previous prosecutor meant that Mr. Cosby should not have been charged in the case.How does this civil case differ from the criminal case?In this civil case in Los Angeles Superior Court, the burden of proof is lower than in a criminal trial. It will be in front of a 12-person jury, with at least nine of 12 votes needed for a verdict. It is expected to last seven to 10 days. Ms. Huth is seeking damages.Mr. Cosby has invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and will not testify and will not attend the trial, his spokesman has said. Ms. Huth is expected to testify, as is the friend who she has said accompanied her to the Playboy Mansion in 1975. More