A California judge has set a trial date for a lawsuit alleging Bill Cosby sexually assaulted a 15-year-old girl at the Playboy Mansion in 1974. In a hearing in Los Angeles on Tuesday, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Craig Kaplan announced that the trial would begin on July 30th, 2018.
Though California’s statute of limitations on sexual assault accusations has passed in the 42-year-old case, Deadline reports that the plaintiff was still able to file her complaint in court because she was a minor at the time of the alleged incident. This makes the case unique among other Cosby lawsuits for incidents that allegedly took place in the 1970s: Three other women have alleged that Cosby assaulted them in that decade, but because the statute of limitations has passed for all three, they have instead filed a joint defamation suit against Cosby, claiming his representatives slandered the plaintiffs when they came forward with their accusations. (That case is ongoing.)
The new court date comes less than two weeks after a Pennsylvania judge declared a mistrial in a previous rape lawsuit against Cosby from 2004. Cosby is currently faced with lawsuits from nine other women on both coasts, the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday.
