Cuba Gooding Jr. settles sex abuse lawsuit just as Manhattan trial was getting underway

Cuba Gooding Jr. settled his civil sex abuse case Tuesday just minutes after it started.

The “Jerry Maguire” actor was slated to go on trial in Manhattan Federal Court at 10 a.m. in the suit accusing him of raping a woman he met at a Greenwich Village bar in 2013.

An entry on the court docket at 10:24 a.m. said the trial had been removed from the calendar because the parties had resolved the matter. Details of the settlement were not immediately available. Cuba’s accuser had demanded $6 million in damages.

Lawyer Gloria Allred, representing the woman who brought the suit anonymously, declined to comment.

Gooding’s lawyers did not immediately respond to a request seeking comment.

The woman alleged that after meeting Gooding at a bar, he invited her for drinks at the Mercer Hotel in SoHo, where he was staying. He then asked her to join him in his room when they arrived so he could change, according to her account.

In the room, the woman claims, Gooding stripped nude and refused to let her leave before proceeding to rape her twice.

Gooding, 55, denied the allegations, contending his accuser was lying and that the encounter was consensual. His lawyers wanted to question two people they alleged she bragged to about sleeping with Gooding.

The eleventh-hour settlement shielded the woman who brought the August 2020 suit from having to disclose her identity, which Judge Paul Crotty ordered last week would be revealed in the trial.

Gooding, meanwhile, avoided the airing out of four accounts accusing him of rape and sexual assault. Crotty found enough similarities between the accounts of three additional women and the account of the accuser who filed the suit to warrant their testimony, noting “that all involve sudden sexual assaults or attempted sexual assaults.”

At least one of the four women slated to testify in the federal case, Kelsey Harbert, was involved in Gooding’s 2022 criminal case in which he dodged a conviction.

The criminal court plea deal allowed him to plead guilty to one misdemeanor count of forcible touching and to apologize to two victims without pleading guilty to related charges. He was permitted to withdraw his misdemeanor plea and enter a new plea to a harassment violation — wiping his criminal record — in exchange for going to therapy.

At one point, prosecutors in the criminal case planned to seek testimony from at least 22 women alleging Gooding sexually assaulted them and threatened them with professional ruin.

Gooding was also required to apologize on the court record per the deal.

“I apologize for making anybody ever feel inappropriately touched, anyone,” Gooding said when he entered his plea. “I am a celebrity figure. I come into contact with people. I never want them to feel slighted or uncomfortable in any way.”

At the trial Gooding dodged Tuesday, Harbert would have testified that Gooding groped her breast at the Magic Hour Club in Manhattan in 2019, which he admitted to in his criminal case.

Gooding also admitted in the criminal case to pinching a woman’s buttocks at TAO restaurant in 2018 and an incident that same year where he forcibly kissed a waitress at LAVO New York. That woman described Gooding’s abuse of women in the service industry as an open secret in her statement at sentencing.

“I wasn’t going to come forward until I realized I was one of four women working in my restaurant that had an incident with him, and one of those women was coming out,” read the LAVO waitress’ statement.

“One of the other women was my trainee. That night, and her first night on the job, Cuba licked her hand right before she watched him force his tongue into my mouth unexpectedly while I delivered him drinks.”

It wasn’t immediately clear whether Tuesday’s settlement requires Gooding to admit wrongdoing.