NEW YORK (AP) — Cuba Gooding Jr. will go on trial in February in his New York City groping case, a judge said Monday, with prosecutors planning to portray the actor as a serial offender and the defense contending the case is an example of #MeToo run amok.
Judge Curtis Farber set a Feb. 1 trial date in the case, which involves allegations the Oscar-winning “Jerry Maguire” star violated three different women at three different Manhattan night spots in 2018 and 2019.
One of the women alleged Gooding pinched her buttocks. Another said he squeezed her breast.
Farber had expressed a desire to start the trial sooner, possibly in December, but Gooding lawyer Peter Toumbekis said he’ll be tied up with trials in the Bronx then.
“I want to lock this down for trial,” Farber said at a hearing in state court in Manhattan. “This case has been on my calendar for two years, going on three years.”
“If I give you a firm date, I don’t want to hear that the case in the Bronx didn’t go and the judge adjourned it to February,” the exasperated judge said. “That’s not going to fly with me.”
Gooding had been scheduled to go on trial in April 2020, but that was scuttled as coronavirus cases surged in New York and the state shut down most court matters.
Gooding was arrested in June 2019 after a 29-year-old woman told police he squeezed her breast without her consent at Magic Hour Rooftop Bar & Lounge near Times Square.
A few months later, Gooding was charged in two additional incidents as more women came forward to accuse him of abuse.
He was accused of pinching a server’s buttocks after making a sexually suggestive remark to her at TAO Downtown and forcibly touching a woman inappropriately at the LAVO New York nightclub, both in 2018.
In all, Gooding, 53, is charged with six misdemeanor counts that could land him in jail if he is convicted.
He has pleaded not guilty and denies all allegations of wrongdoing. His lawyers have argued that overzealous prosecutors, caught up in the fervor of the #MeToo movement, are trying to turn “commonplace gestures” or misunderstandings into crimes.
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