A New York jury gave $ 1.68 billion on Wednesday in damage to 40 women. who accused the writer and director James Toback of sexual abuse and other crimes in a period of 35 years, according to lawyers representing the plaintiffs.
The decision comes from a lawsuit filed in Manhattan in 2022 after the state of New York Instituted a one year window For people to present demands about sexual assault claims, even if they took place decades ago.
It marks one of the largest jury awards since the advent of the #MeToo movement, as well as in the history of the state of New York, said lawyer Brad Beckworth, of the law firm Nix Patterson LLP, in an interview. The plaintiffs, he said, believe that such a large verdict will send a message to powerful people “who do not treat women properly.”
The court had not yet published documentation of the verdict until Wednesday night. Beckworth said the verdict included $ 280 million in compensatory damages and $ 1.4 billion for punitive damages for the plaintiffs.
“This verdict is justice,” Beckworth said in a statement. “But most importantly, it is about recovering the power of abusers, and their facilitators, and returning it to those whom he tried to control and silence.”
Beckworth said the abuse took place between 1979 and 2014.
Toback was nominated for an Oscar for writing “Bugsy” of 1991, and his career in Hollywood has covered more than 40 years. The accusations that participated in years of sexual abuse arose at the end of 2017 as the #MeToo movement caught attention. They were first reported by Los Angeles Times.
In 2018, Los Angeles prosecutors said the statutes of limitations had expired in five cases they reviewed, and refused to present criminal charges against Toback.
The plaintiffs then filed a lawsuit in New York a few days after the Law of Adult Survivors of the State entered into force. The lawyers said they discovered a Toba pattern of the attempt to attract young women in the streets of New York to falsely know promising roles in their films and then submit them to sexual acts, threats and psychological coercion.
Mary Monahan, a main plaintiff in the case, described the “validation” of the jury award for her and the other women.
“For decades, I took this trauma in silence, and today, a jury believed me. He believed us. That changes everything,” he said in a statement. “This verdict is more than a number: it is a statement. We are not disposable. We are not liars. We are not collateral damage to the power of another person. The world now knows what we have always known: what it did was real.”
Toback, 80, who had recently represented himself, denied numerous occasions in the judicial documents that “committed any sexual crime” and that “any sexual encounter or contact between the plaintiffs and the defendant was consensual.”
He also argued that the New York Law that extended the Statute of Limitations in cases of sexual abuse violated their constitutional rights.
A message sent to an email address that appears on the comment list was not responded immediately.
In January, the judge in the case issued a default sentence against Toback, which had not appeared in the Court when he was ordered to do so. Then, the judge scheduled a trial for only damage last month to determine how much Toback had to pay women.
