Actor Cuba Gooding Jr., the Oscar-winning star of Jerry Maguire, has been found guilty on Wednesday to be done forceful touching to multiple women between 2018 and 2019.
Thus, the prolonged criminal case accuses the actor of sexually abusing three different women in various Manhattan nightclubs in 2018 and 2019, according to the North American media. The Hollywood Reporter.
court report
Three years ago, in 2019, he was preventively arrested when a 29-year-old woman reported to the police that he had touched her breast without her consent in a late-night bar near Times Square.
Thus, until the trial previously scheduled in April 2020, the actor’s lawyers did not deny the facts but sought sentence reductions or charges dismissed. But due to the pandemic and a growing number of covid cases, the trial was postponed.
A few months later, he was charged again. Multiple women came forward to accuse him of abuse and the new charges alleged groping on the buttocks after making sexual comments and forceful touching inappropriately in a New York nightclub, both in 2018. Thus, Gooding was convicted of the latter charge.
Previously found ‘not guilty’
Gooding had declared innocent of six counts of misdemeanors previously and had denied all allegations of wrongdoing. Also, his lawyers have argued that he had overzealous prosecutorscaught up in the fervor of the movement #MeToo, that they were trying to convert “common gestures” or misunderstandings in crimes, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
21 women involved
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The judge had ruled that if the Gooding case went to trial, prosecutors they could have called two more women to testify about their accusations that Gooding had also abused. Those women, whose statements did not lead to criminal charges, were among 19 other accusers to whom the prosecutors they sought to call as witnesses.
Along with the criminal case, Gooding is accused in a lawsuit of raping a woman in New York City in 2013. After a judge issued a default judgment in July because Gooding had failed to respond to the lawsuit, the actor hired an attorney and is currently fighting the allegations.