A judge in California has ordered Bill Cosby or his lawyers into court next month to address questions about his assets as a woman who sued him for sexually assaulting her seeks to enforce payment of a $59 million judgment she was awarded earlier this year.
In March, a civil jury made the award after finding that Cosby had drugged and sexually assaulted the woman, Donna Motsinger, a former server at a Sausalito restaurant, after escorting her to one of his comedy shows in 1972.
In court papers, lawyers for Motsinger said Cosby, 89, hasn’t paid anything toward the judgment and, citing bank records, raised concern that in the past he and his family had moved assets around in a way that could hinder their ability to collect the judgment.
“Cosby has paid none of the judgment, while showing a clear record of liquidating assets and then immediately dissipating the proceeds,” Motsinger’s lawyers wrote in court papers.
Lawyers for Cosby did not respond to a request for comment.
A hearing in the effort to enforce the judgment had originally been scheduled for January in Los Angeles Superior Court. But Motsinger’s lawyers, citing the financial transactions outlined in the court papers, asked the judge in the case, Bradley S. Phillips, to move up the date. In an order issued Tuesday, the hearing was set for September.
Cosby has consistently maintained that any sexual contact he had with women was consensual. He has lodged an appeal of the trial finding.
Judgments become due at the time they are awarded, though enforcement of them is left to the party who won to arrange. The lawyers for Motsinger wrote in the complaint that Cosby had failed to respond to post-judgment questions meant to identify his assets.
One of the lawyers, Jesse Creed, detailed financial transactions in court papers that, while they occurred before the award of the judgment, were indicative, he argued, of an effort to transfer assets in ways that could prevent them from being subject to an enforcement action. For example, he cited bank records obtained by subpoena that showed that proceeds from the sale of a New York town house were wired into a Cosby account last November and within 48 hours, $1.29 million was transferred to other accounts, including those belonging to friends.
Though dozens of women have come forward to accuse Cosby of sexual abuse, he was only criminally charged in one case. He was convicted, but in 2021 that conviction was overturned for procedural reasons after Cosby had served three years of a three- to 10-year sentence at a prison outside Philadelphia.
In that case, he was convicted of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand, a former Temple University employee to whom Cosby had become a mentor. He was freed after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that a “non-prosecution agreement” with a previous prosecutor meant he should not have been charged.
Cosby promoted the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision as a full exoneration, and over the years, Cosby’s lawyers have depicted him as someone who unfairly became a target of the emotions stirred by the #MeToo movement.
But the Motsinger case is one of two recent civil court findings that reinforce an image of him as a person who wielded his celebrity to take advantage of women.
After his release from prison, Cosby was the subject of a civil trial in 2022 brought by another accuser, Judy Huth. In that case, the jury found that Cosby had sexually assaulted Huth in 1975, when as a 16-year-old girl she accepted his invitation to join him at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles.
In Motsinger’s lawsuit, she described how Cosby had attacked her when they were both in their 30s, after giving her wine and a pill that had left her incapacitated. Cosby did not testify at the trial.
Years ago, Motsinger’s case would have been time-barred because she did not make the accusation until after the expiration of the statute of limitations for such suits. But her case became possible because California is among the states that have amended the statutes in sexual assault cases so accusers can come forward even after a lengthy passage of time.
Cosby says he has recently run into financial difficulties. During a deposition in the Motsinger case, he described being unable to get the high-profile work he once enjoyed as a comedy star whose television series “The Cosby Show” became a major success.
But an expert witness Motsinger’s lawyers called to the stand before the jury’s final decision this year estimated that Cosby was worth roughly $128 million.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
