The actor pleaded guilty to a single harassment charge after being accused of groping and kissing three women. A score of similar stories emerged after his arrest.
The actor Cuba Gooding Jr. pleaded guilty to a single count of harassment on Thursday, ending a criminal case that began with one report of sex abuse that prompted additional accusations from women across the country.
Mr. Gooding, 54, who won an Academy Award in 1997 for his portrayal of a brash football player in “Jerry Maguire,” was charged in 2019 with groping and forcibly kissing three women, one of many prominent men whose behavior was exposed by the #MeToo movement. He was sentenced in State Supreme Court in Manhattan to time served.
Prosecutors had sought permission from the court to present trial testimony from 19 women who came forward after Mr. Gooding was initially charged in Manhattan. Although their accounts were not part of the criminal case, the district attorney’s office wanted them to provide evidence that Mr. Gooding’s behavior was part of a pattern.
A judge, Justice Curtis Farber, initially agreed to permit two of the women to testify, but he ultimately reversed that decision, a prosecutor said. And in April, prosecutors said that they had reached an agreement that would let Mr. Gooding plead to the harassment charge as long as he was not arrested again and continued alcohol and behavior modification treatment that he had begun in 2019. A prosecutor said in court on Thursday that Mr. Gooding had satisfied those conditions.
Although Mr. Gooding no longer faces criminal charges in Manhattan, two civil suits accusing him of abuse are active, one in State Supreme Court and the other in Federal District Court.
Mr. Gooding, who was born in the Bronx, had his first major success playing the lead role in the 1991 film “Boyz in the Hood.” He also played O.J. Simpson in the 2016 television series “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story.”
His case in Manhattan drew intense public interest. Police officials said that a decorated sex crimes detective was stripped of his shield and gun and placed on administrative duty after investigators concluded that he had given Mr. Gooding’s mug shot to an entertainment website.
Little more than a week later, a prosecutor complained to Justice Farber after TMZ published surveillance camera footage of Mr. Gooding and a woman that the Manhattan district attorney’s office had provided to the defense as required by trial rules. (A lawyer for Mr. Gooding denied in court that the video had been leaked by anyone working with him.)
The criminal case began in the summer of 2019, when Mr. Gooding was charged with sexual abuse and forcible touching after a woman, who later identified herself as Kelsey Harbert, told detectives that he had touched her breast inside Magic Hour, a rooftop bar in the Moxy NYC Times Square hotel.
That fall, the accusations snowballed. Mr. Gooding was charged with groping a woman at Lavo, an Italian restaurant on East 58th Street with a downstairs nightclub, and with pinching the buttocks of another woman who was working at Tao Downtown, a nightclub in Chelsea.
The woman at Tao identified herself as Natasha Ashworth in a lawsuit filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan that accused Mr. Gooding of battery, assault and the intentional infliction of emotional distress.
Ms. Ashworth’s suit, which asks for unspecified damages, said that she was working as a server at Tao when Mr. Gooding asked whether she wanted to see his “impression of a penis,” then drank from a cup and began spurting liquid. Later that night, the suit said, Mr. Gooding pinched her right buttock. When she objected, the suit said he replied, “Aw, that’s no fun.”
As the district attorney’s office investigated, additional women, most of them from outside of Manhattan, came forward with their own descriptions of Mr. Gooding’s behavior, detailing events that had generally taken place several years ago.
Still, prosecutors drew from some of those accounts when they asked Justice Farber to allow testimony in Mr. Gooding’s trial by the 19 additional women, writing that his “prior acts demonstrate that his contacts with their intimate parts are intentional, not accidental, and that he is not mistaken about their lack of consent.”
One woman said that in about 2007 at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas, Mr. Gooding tried to kiss her, and had also licked her face and grabbed her backside. Another woman said that in 2011 in a bar in Los Angeles, Mr. Gooding grabbed her arm, put his hand inside her blouse and squeezed her breast as she walked past him. And in 2014 at a restaurant in Malibu, Calif., a woman said Mr. Gooding approached her with no prior interaction, reached under her skirt and touched her vagina.
A lawyer for Mr. Gooding dismissed many of the accounts that surfaced after his arrest as inaccurate, suggesting that accusers might have emerged “out of the woodwork” because of his client’s fame. And the defense objected to the additional testimony proposed by the prosecutors, saying any value it might provide as evidence would be outweighed by the potential prejudice to Mr. Gooding.
In 2020, Justice Farber ruled that two of the 19 women cited by prosecutors could testify: one who said Mr. Gooding grabbed her and licked her neck at a hotel bar in Midtown Manhattan in 2013, and another who told prosecutors that the actor groped and forcibly kissed her at a bar in Santa Monica, Calif., in 2018. But in April, when Mr. Gooding pleaded guilty, a prosecutor said that Justice Farber had reversed his ruling on the additional witnesses.
Perhaps the most serious accusation against Mr. Gooding came in a civil suit that was filed in federal court in Manhattan in 2020. In that case, a woman referred to only as Jane Doe said that Mr. Gooding raped her in 2013 inside his room in the Mercer Hotel in SoHo. Lawyers for Mr. Gooding have denied that allegation.
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