AP- A woman who said Bill Cosby sexually assaulted her when she was a young comedy writer more than 50 years ago filed a lawsuit against the actor Thursday under a soon-to-expire New York law that gave victims of sexual abuse a one-year window for claims that would otherwise be barred by time limits.
Cosby, 86, has been accused of rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment by more than 60 women. He has denied all allegations involving sex crimes.
Joan Tarshis initially came forward with allegations against Cosby in 2014 that are repeated in the new lawsuit. Tarshis said Cosby drugged her and forced her to perform oral sex on him in 1969 or 1970, and then drugged and raped her during another encounter a year or two later.
The New York resident was living in California at the time of the first assault and had met Cosby through a mutual friend while he was starring in “The Bill Cosby Show,” according to the lawsuit, filed in state Supreme Court in New York City.
Tarshis previously sued Cosby in Massachusetts, where Cosby had a home. She was among seven women who filed defamation claims after Cosby branded them liars. The cases were settled in 2019.
A spokesperson for Cosby, 86, declined to comment on the specifics of the lawsuit, but suggested that look-back windows in place in New York and elsewhere should be closed because they were being abused to go after wealthy celebrities.
The new lawsuit alleges assault, battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress and false imprisonment. It seeks unspecified damages. “When will it stop and who will be the next man to be victimized by these look-back windows?”
“Diddy, LA Reid, Steven Tyler, and now they circle back to this,” spokesperson Andrew Wyatt said, referring to others recently sued under New York’s Adult Survivors Act. “When is it going to stop?”
Antonio “L.A.” Reid, a music executive, was sued last week by an executive who alleges that Reid sexually assaulted her twice in 2001. Email and telephone messages left for Joel Katz, an attorney who represented Reid when the allegations surfaced in 2017, weren’t immediately returned Friday night.
Sean “Diddy” Combs has denied allegations of rape and abuse brought by a former girlfriend earlier this week.
Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler has not publicly responded to a lawsuit filed earlier this month.
Cosby has been accused of rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment by more than 60 women, including several who have filed lawsuits over the past year under the Adult Survivors Act. He has denied all allegations involving sex crimes.
Cosby was the first celebrity tried and convicted in the #MeToo era and spent nearly three years at a state prison near Philadelphia before a higher court overturned the conviction and released him in 2021.
US Supreme Court shows indifference to wrongful convictions
Daniel Ortiz, Jones’ attorney in the Barry Jones’ case said, the court’s decision leaves “no way out” for people imprisoned for actions that are later declared not to be a crime.
“It’s also just one example of the increasing hostility this court has to all forms of post conviction relief,” Ortiz added.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan wrote in dissent that the ruling blocks a “prisoner who is actually innocent” from raising that claim “merely because he previously sought post conviction relief.”
In a separate dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson methodically parsed the majority’s analysis and its underlying reasoning — and ultimately came up empty-handed.
There “is simply no justification” for the court’s conclusions, not under the letter of the law, nor as a matter of policy and real-world outcomes, Jackson said.
She added that the majority “tiptoes around what Jones is actually arguing” — legal innocence — by using euphemisms and obscuring language.
The Jones decision and others before it demonstrate conservatives’ apparent indifference to some of the most grave miscarriages of criminal justice. In effect, the court’s majority has quietly turned its backs to Americans who were wrongly convicted — who are almost always poor and disproportionately Black — and are languishing under excessive sentences or facing execution for crimes they didn’t commit.
In 2021, the court held that prisoners can’t seek relief under a precedent which established that non-unanimous verdicts are unconstitutional, saying it applies to open cases, but not retroactively. That decision concerned a Black man facing a life sentence, and who was found not guilty by the lone Black juror in his trial. It also eliminated prisoners’ ability to argue for retroactive relief based on any other new rule of criminal procedure.
The decision in Barry Jones’ case, which blocked petitioners from introducing new evidence to show that their lawyers were ineffective, came the next month. The court later declined a motion to correct a factual error in its opinion that made it more likely that the defendants’ death sentences would be reinstated.
And, in June 2022, the court restricted prisoners’ ability to obtain medical or other scientific evidence that might show that their convictions were unconstitutional.
Those rulings rested on dubious interpretations of post conviction laws or the perceived hassle of reviewing past convictions. But even the “finality” explanation doesn’t really hold water.
Under the court’s latest ruling, a prisoner convicted of being a felon-in-possession 30 years ago could challenge that sentence, so long as the prisoner hasn’t filed a previous motion to vacate, while someone who was sentenced for the same crime two years ago cannot, Jackson pointed out.
As the dissenters wrote, it is disturbing to see that the highest court in our judiciary tolerates, even prefers, these kinds of manifestly unjust outcomes.
PACE TULSA 
2 thoughts on “Survivor Law Look-back Windows”