Actor Cuba Gooding Jr., 51, has been charged with one count of misdemeanor forcible touching in New York City after a woman claimed that he allegedly groped her, according to his attorney.
According to Page Six, the actor was arrested today (June 13) for the alleged incident, turning himself in at Manhattan’s Special Victims Division base on East 123rd Street just after 2 p.m. He’s expected to be arraigned later tonight at a Manhattan criminal court.
Gooding Jr.’s lawyer, Mark Heller, says he had an opportunity to view surveillance footage from the bar and said it shows “absolutely no criminality taking place on the part of my client” (check out the video above).
Gooding Jr. was accused of groping a woman at a New York City rooftop bar, but the Oscar winner says it never happened.
The alleged incident took place at the Magic Hour Rooftop Bar, over the weekend, according to the woman who called the police.
The woman claimed that Gooding Jr. was “highly intoxicated” and touched her breast.
“The NYPD takes sexual assault extremely seriously, and urges anyone who has been a victim to file a police report so we can perform a comprehensive investigation, and offer support and services to survivors,” New York Police Department said in a statement on Monday (Jun. 10).
Gooding Jr. spoke with TMZ on Thursday regarding the alleged incident while at the airport in Los Angeles and said nothing inappropriate transpired that night-purposefully or by accident.
“All I have to say is the following, in this time and age we need to let people speak for themselves, we have to let people express themselves,” he said. “And now I’m giving the process the chance to show what really happened, what went down.”
Glennisha Morgan is a Detroit-bred multimedia journalist and writer. She writes about intersectionality, hip-hop, pop culture, queer issues, race, feminism, and her truth. Follow her on Twitter.