During a recent appearance on The Kelly Clarkson Show, actress Angela Bassett recalled first meeting Chadwick Boseman on the campus of Howard University in 2000.
Boseman — who graduated from the acclaimed HBCU that same year — was the student assigned to escort Bassett that day around the university, where she was the commencement speaker and received an honorary doctorate, according to Yahoo News. The Black Panther star “was my guide, he was my student guide,” Bassett told Clarkson.
Actor Cuba Gooding Jr. appears in court, Jan. 22, 2020, in New York. Gooding Jr. pleaded guilty Wednesday, April 13, 2022 to one count of forcible touching in a protracted criminal case accusing the Oscar-winning star of violating three different women at various Manhattan night spots in 2018 and 2019. (Alec Tabak/The Daily News via AP, Pool)
Gooding, 54, accused of violating three different women at various Manhattan night spots in 2018 and 2019, pleaded guilty to just one of the allegations.
He told the judge he “kissed the waitress on her lips” without consent at the LAVO New York nightclub.
Gooding’s plea deal calls for no jail time. If he continues counseling for six months, he can withdraw the misdemeanor plea and plead guilty to a lesser violation of harassment.
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, he was charged in two additional cases as more women came forward to accuse him of abuse. The new charges alleged he pinched a server’s buttocks after making a sexually suggestive remark to her at TAO Downtown and forcibly touched a woman inappropriately at the LAVO nightclub, both in 2018.
Gooding had previously pleaded not guilty to six misdemeanor counts and denied 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.
The judge had ruled that if the Gooding case went to trial, prosecutors could have called two additional women to testify about their allegations that Gooding also violated them. Those women, whose claims did not result in criminal charges, were among 19 other accusers whom prosecutors were seeking to call as witnesses.
Along with the criminal case, Gooding is accused in a lawsuit of raping a woman in New York City in 2013. After a judge issued a default judgment in July because Gooding hadn’t responded to the lawsuit, the actor retained a lawyer and is fighting the allegations.
