UPDATED, 9:33 AM: Cuba Gooding Jr. will not have to face trial for rape.
Minutes before jury selection was schedule to start this morning in New York in the civil case against the Oscar winner for an alleged 2013 assault, a deal was announced between the Oscar winner and the unnamed plaintiff.
“TRIAL OFF: The jury trial scheduled to go forward today is off the calendar,” it said in the federal court docket Tuesday. “Reason for cancellation (on consent): the parties have resolved the matter.”
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As is common with matters such as this, the settlement is being kept confidential. However, from what sources tell us, Gooding paid the alleged victim a “considerable sum” to end the case.
Seeking $6 million in damages when she first filed the action nearly three years ago, the Gloria Allred represented plaintiff was ordered last week by US District Judge Paul Crotty to refile her complaint and reveal her identity in fairness to Gooding – which may have played a role in today’s settlement. On the other hand, the court had also allowed a trio of other women to testify at the trial of Gooding assaulting them or trying to assault them.
One of the women who would have taken the stand was Kelsey Harbert.
Last year, Gooding entered a plea of guilty to a noncriminal harassment violation in the case that Harbert filed against him in 2019. In that matter, Gooding was accused of forcibly fondling the plaintiff in a NYC night club in the summer of that year. As a part of his plea on a lesser charge, Gooding received no jail time or a criminal history out of the Harbert case.
Today, Allred said that she and her client in the civil case had “no comment at this time.
PREVIOUSLY, AUG 202, AM: Cuba Gooding Jr. has been accused of rape in a case filed in New York federal court, in which a woman accuses the Oscar-winning actor of raping her in a Manhattan hotel in 2013.
In the lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Southern District of New York, a woman identified as Jane Doe said Gooding raped her twice in a Soho hotel room in 2013 after the two met earlier at a Greenwich Village VIP lounge. The suit (read it here) graphically describes the encounter at the Mercer Hotel, which the plaintiff said occurred after Gooding invited her for drinks at the downstairs bar. She said he had invited her upstairs to change his clothes, and the attacks occurred there.
The filing was made pursuant to New York City’s Victims of Gender-Motivated Violence Protection Law, and “seeks damages to redress the injuries Plaintiff has suffered as a result of being a victim of violence committed on the basis of gender, and due, at least in part, to an animus based on gender.”
The jury-seeking suit seeks damages for mental, emotional and physical injury, distress, pain and suffering and injury.
Gooding’s lawyer Mark Heller told the Associated Press that the “alleged event never took place” and that his client is “innocent of any of these false allegations.”
The filing comes as Gooding last fall pleaded not guilty in a Manhattan courtroom to six misdemeanor criminal charges of forcible touching in incidents that occurred in 2018 and last year. That trial has been delayed by the coronavirus but is expected to take place sometime this year.
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