Cuba Gooding Jr. facing federal lawsuit accusing him of rape

Actor Cuba Gooding Jr., who was accused of groping or forced kissing by about 20 women, pleaded guilty last year to a single charge of kissing a woman without her consent.

He will face a civil trial on Tuesday accusing him of rape, and there is expected to be testimony from three women who will say he abused them between 2009 and 2019.

The case, filed in 2020 in Federal District Court in Manhattan on behalf of a woman identified only as Jane Doe, contained the most serious allegations to date against Mr. Gooding. It was one of a constellation of civil and criminal cases brought against prominent men amid the #MeToo movement, a broad rethinking of sex and power in America and beyond.

Many of the allegations involved figures in the entertainment world. mr. A native of the Bronx, Gooding had starred in the 1991 film “Boyz N the Hood” and had won an Academy Award in 1997 for a supporting role in “Jerry Maguire”.

Jury selection in the Jane Doe trial begins Tuesday. Her lawsuit, seeking unspecified damages, details events that allegedly occurred in the summer of 2013, when the plaintiff said Mr. Gooding introduced himself to her at a restaurant and lounge in Greenwich Village and later invited her for drinks. at the Mercer, a hotel in Soho.

There, the lawsuit said, Mr Gooding told the woman to change quickly, led her to his room on the fifth floor of the hotel and began to undress. When the woman tried to leave, the lawsuit said, Mr Gooding blocked her and pushed her onto a bed and sexually touched her despite her repeated objections, eventually penetrating her as she tried to get off the bed.

A lawyer representing Mr Gooding at the time the lawsuit was filed called the allegations “completely false and defamatory”.

The judge overseeing the case, Paul A. Crotty, granted a request from Jane Doe’s attorneys, including longtime women’s rights advocate Gloria Allred, to hear testimony from other women who had accused Mr. Gooding of touching them without permission.

Among the women expected to testify is Kelsey Harbert, who has said that in 2019, Mr. Gooding groped her breast while she was in an expensive lounge at Manhattan’s Moxy NYC Times Square Hotel.

Mr Gooding faced criminal charges over her account and those of two other women who described similar behaviour. As investigators investigated those allegations, more than 20 women accused Mr Gooding of groping or forcibly kissing them during encounters stretching back more than two decades.

Last year, Mr Gooding pleaded guilty to a single count of forcible touching, accusing him of kissing a woman in a Manhattan nightclub in 2018 without her consent.

Mr Gooding was allowed to withdraw his initial plea last autumn and instead plead guilty to a lesser charge of harassment after continuing the alcohol and behavior modification treatment he began in 2019 and avoiding further arrests.