Actor Cuba Gooding Jr. avoids a rape trial by reaching an agreement with the whistleblower

The actor Cuba Gooding Jr. has avoided appearing this Tuesday in a federal court in Manhattan for a civil lawsuit filed by a woman who accuses him of having raped her in a New York hotel in 2013. The protagonist of Jerry Maguire, winner of an Oscar in 1996, had insisted through his lawyers that his meeting with the woman was consensual. The trial, by civil means, was going to begin with the selection of the jury in court, and in fact its members began to meet in the courtroom minutes before a notation in the official court record informed of the annulment at 10:24 a.m. of the trial, by “consent [dado que] the parties have resolved the matter”, although the details of the extrajudicial agreement are unknown.

The woman had been proceeding anonymously until last week, when Judge Paul A. Crotty ruled that she would have to reveal her name at trial; the summary referred to it with the generic jane doe which enshrines the anonymity of plaintiffs or female witnesses. According to the lawsuit, she met Cuba Gooding Jr. at a Manhattan restaurant, and he convinced her to meet him at a hotel and wait in her room while he changed clothes. The actor’s lawyers, however, add not only that the relationship was supposedly consensual, but also the fact that she later boasted to other people of her intimacy with a celebrity.

The plaintiff was seeking $6 million in damages from a man authorities say has been accused of sexual misconduct by more than 30 women, including groping, forced kissing and other abusive conduct. In fact, last Friday, Judge Crotty appeared to strengthen the woman’s position at trial and in settlement negotiations, by ruling that he would allow three other women to testify that they were also sexually abused or attempted assaulted. sexual after meeting Gooding in social settings such as festivals, bars, nightclubs, and restaurants. The magistrate disavowed the testimony of a fourth woman, who accuses the actor of having groped her chest, as redundant.

A Gooding, very popular in the nineties thanks to films like Boyz n the Hood (The neighborhood colleaguesin Spain) and Radiowas allowed to plead guilty in April 2022 to a misdemeanor in another case, admitting to forcibly kissing a worker at a New York nightclub in 2018. After six months of alcohol and behavioral rehabilitation, Gooding he then withdrew his initial guilty plea and instead pleaded guilty to that misdemeanor, expunging his criminal record and avoiding further penalties.

As in the case of former President Donald Trump, sentenced last month to compensate a woman with five million dollars for sexual abuse and defamation, the civil proceedings against Cuba Gooding Jr. were not going to result in a prison sentence, but rather only in monetary compensation. Prospects for a settlement, which often avoids trial in civil cases, however looked dim last Thursday due to deep differences between the litigants.