James Toback Ordered To Pay $1.7 Billion To 40 Women Following Sexual Assault Trial

Director James Toback was ordered Wednesday by a New York jury to pay $1.68 billion to 40 women who accused him of sexual assault.

Brad Beckworth, an attorney for the victims, told The Associated Press the amount was one of the largest for sex assault damages in state history.

“I think this jury spoke loud and clear,” Beckworth said Wednesday, per Variety. “We wanted their voice to be heard and to reverberate across the country to tell insiders and people in positions of power that we will not tolerate using that power against women.”

During the nascent stages of the Me Too movement, a bombshell 2017 exposé by the Los Angeles Times brought up allegations against Toback from 38 women. The article prompted more than 300 other women to come forward within days of its publication.

Toback, an Oscar nominee who wrote the Warren Beatty gangster film “Bugsy” (1991), denied the allegations at the time.

The Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office said in 2018 that it was considering charges, but prosecutors cited expired statutes of limitation in declining. New York’s 2022 Adult Survivors Act, which suspended such statutes for one year, provided victims with recourse. The plaintiffs filed their suit in December 2022, mere months after the law was passed.

Toback reportedly didn’t attend the trial or prior hearings, prompting the default judgment against him, though he denied the allegations early in the trial, according to Variety. On Wednesday, he was ordered to pay $280 million in compensatory damages and $1.4 billion in punitive damages, according to a release from Beckworth’s firm, Nix Patterson.

Many of his victims said he approached them with promises of fame before subjecting them to sexual acts around New York City. Beckworth said Wednesday that the crimes they endured spanned from 1979 to 2014.

The seven-day trial saw 20 women take the stand and 20 more provide their testimony on video for the jury, Variety reported. Toback was accused of sexually assaulting them in his New York City apartment, in his editing suite, in public parks and in the Harvard Club.

His accusers provided the Los Angeles Times with disturbing detail in 2017, saying Toback ejaculated in front of them, asked about their masturbation habits, ordered them to disrobe and rubbed his groin against their bodies — in hotel rooms, on movie sets and in offices.

“For decades, I carried this trauma in silence, and today, a jury believed me,” lead plaintiff Mary Monahan said in a press release Wednesday. “Believed us. That changes everything. This verdict is more than a number — it’s a declaration.

“We are not disposable,” she continued. “We are not liars. We are not collateral damage in someone else’s power trip. The world knows now what we’ve always known: what he did was real. And what we did — standing up, speaking out — was right.”

Need help? Visit RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Online Hotline or the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s website.