Bill Cosby and Hugh Hefner Hit With Sexual Battery Suit Over 2008 Playboy Mansion Assault Claims
[Deadline]
Deadline
May 16, 2016

Just over three months after Chloe Goins dropped her federal lawsuit against Bill Cosby, the model is now hitting the actor — and new defendant Hugh Hefner — for sexual battery, gender violence, and other charges stemming from a 2008 incident that occurred at the Playboy Mansion.

“Defendant HEFNER’s actions of inviting and hosting young and impressionable and possibly minor children to his residence, and providing alcoholic beverages and or foreign substances was negligent at the very least,” the complaint, which was filed Monday in L.A. Superior Court, says of adding the Playboy founder to the case (read it here). “Additionally, his act of inviting or housing and introducing Defendant COSBY, the Defendant HEFNER knew or should have known had a history of severe and serial sexual battery and or possibly rape of women was negligent at the very least, and Defendant HEFNER knew or should have known such actions would lead to harm of his invitees and Plaintiff.”

Goins is requesting a jury trial and is seeking damages.

Back on Feb. 2, Goins filed a dismissal “without prejudice” of her October 2015 case against Cosby, whom she once called a “serial rapist.” While that action appeared to indicate a settlement had been reached in the lawsuit, the “without prejudice” part meant Goins could try to get Cosby before the courts again — as has happened today. That dismissal by the 26-year-old model came less than a month after the L.A. district attorney’s office decided that Cosby would not face criminal charges over the sexual assault incidents that allegedly occurred eight years ago when she was 18. Part of the reason given at the time by D.A. Jackie Lacey’s office was that the witnesses Goins claimed existed would not back up her story.
With somewhat graphic descriptions of how the now much-accused Cosby allegedly plied her with drink, drugs, and then, while she was “unconscious,” assaulted and “molested” her, Goins’s lawyer Spencer Kuvin of West Palm Beach, Fla., and new attorney Kevin Kensik of Rolling Hills Estates, Calif., cited other cases that have emerged of past alleged Cosby incidents at the mansion to claim host Hefner “was familiar with Defendant COSBY’s habit and act of intoxicating young women and spending the night with them while at his residence.”
More than 50 women have come forward in recent years to claim that The Cosby Show creator drugged and/or assaulted them. Currently, the only criminal case that has been filed is in Pennsylvania, where Cosby is fighting a trio of felony second-degree aggravated indecent assault charges that could land him a decade behind bars for the alleged 2004 assault of then Temple University employee Andrea Constand. Today, the local D.A. in that case urged the state’s Supreme Court to reject Cosby’s attempt last week to halt that action so an appeal could be heard.