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A CIVIL jury in California has awarded more than US$19 million to a woman who accused Bill Cosby of drugging and sexually assaulting her in the early 1970s.
The decision, delivered on 23 March after a hearing in Santa Monica, found in favour of Ms Donna Motsinger, now 84, who said she had been working as a waitress when Cosby began to target her.
AFP cited today that the court heard that the comedian first encountered Motsinger at the restaurant where she was employed. On a later occasion, when he collected her in a limousine, he allegedly gave her a glass of wine along with what she believed to be an aspirin.
She began slipping in and out of consciousness and the next thing she knew she was waking up at home, wearing only her underwear.
“She knew she had been drugged and raped by Bill Cosby,” the suit said.
Cosby, now 88, did not testify that he recalled any sexual contact with Motsinger. His legal team maintained that any such contact, if it occurred, had been consensual.
After three days of deliberation, the jury ordered Cosby to pay US$19.3 million, with the possibility that the total could rise if punitive damages are added.
The case was heard in the same courthouse where, in 2022, a separate jury ordered Cosby to pay US$500,000 to Ms Judy Huth, who accused him of molesting her in 1975 when she was 16.
Once widely known as “America’s Dad” for his role in The Cosby Show, Cosby was a dominant figure in late 20th-century American popular culture.
He was convicted in Pennsylvania in 2018 for drugging and sexually assaulting another woman, but that conviction was overturned in 2021 on a technicality, leading to his release from prison.
Dozens of women have accused Cosby of being a calculating, serial predator who used alcohol and sedatives to incapacitate victims before assaulting them over several decades. - March 24, 2026