A woman present with Judy Huth, when she alleges Bill Cosby sexually assaulted her, took the stand. She was questioned about previous statements she made about the night in question.
The questioning has been described as the “Donkey Kong defense” because the woman claimed she was playing the popular video game when the assault allegedly happened, but the game had not been released until six years after the alleged assault.
According to The Associated Press, Donna Samuelson, a high school friend of Huth, was with the accuser when she went to the Playboy Mansion in 1975. She had previously given statements about a game room with an adjacent bedroom where Huth alleges Cosby forced her to perform a sex act.
In a deposition, Samuelson said she was playing the Donkey Kong video game while Huth was in the bedroom with Cosby. In the video clip that Cosby’s attorney, Jennifer Bonjean, played, Samuelson mentions the video game several times. Donkey Kong was released in 1981.
“You testified multiple times that you were playing Donkey Kong,” Bonjean said, as she referred to an interview she had given to police in 2014 and a 2016 deposition in Huth’s case.
“If I did, I did,” Samuelson responded. “I understand it wasn’t around yet.”
She was then asked to explain the discrepancy, and she stated, “I got the name wrong. I just kept saying that because it was a game. It could have been Atari.”
Bonjean showed Samuelson and the jury a picture taken in 2016 of the game room. The Donkey Kong video game could be seen in the photo, and Bonjean asked whether similar photos taken years after the alleged attack could have affected her memory and testimony.
Samuelson stated that she did not see such an image until recently when the 2016 photo was shown to her in court during her testimony last week.
When the trial started last Wednesday, Huth’s attorney, Nathan Goldberg, mentioned to the jury that they would hear “the Donkey Kong defense” from Cosby’s attorneys to get ahead of Samuelson’s testimony.
“So she got the name wrong,” Goldberg said, “so what?”
Bonjean grabbed the opportunity in her opening statement to embrace what Goldberg said. She stated that based on that logic, plus photos showing the arcade game in later pictures would prove that she and Huth were concocting a false story.
According to USA Today, a civil lawsuit filed against Cosby back in 2014 started trial last week with jury selection in Santa Monica, California.
The accuser is Judy Huth,
who says Cosby groped her as a teenager at the Playboy Mansion in 1974. The case was delayed in 2015 after the legendary entertainer was arrested and then jailed in Pennsylvania on sex-crime charges.Last summer, Pennsylvania’s highest court, the State Supreme Court, overturned Bill Cosby’s sex assault conviction, citing a previous agreement that prevented him from being charged in the first place.
The disgraced TV star went to a prison near Philadelphia. In 2018, Cosby was sentenced to serve three to 10 years in prison for sexually assaulting and drugging Andrea Constand at his home in 2004.