UPDATED, 5:03 PM: The strategy of Bill Cosby’s new lawyers is becoming clear: attack the accusers. With dozens and dozens of women alleging that the comedian sexually assaulted or drugged them over the decades, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan today went after Beverly Johnson for defamation. This comes less than a week after Cosby’s team did the same thing to seven women in federal court in Massachusetts.
Today’s filing against model and actress Johnson in Los Angeles Superior Court (read it here) seeks punitive damages and an injunction preventing her from “continuing to publish her defamatory statements.” Johnson said, initially in a Vanity Fairarticle and in subsequent interviews, that Cosby drugged her with spiked cappucino at his New York home during the 1980s. It claims she “is no stranger to making salacious allegations even before her false allegations about Mr.Cosby. She previously made allegations of abuse against two of her boyfriends, neither of which resulted in charges or any finding of liability.” It adds that Johnson “has repeated her lies about Mr. Cosby drugging her to every media publication, newspaper, magazine or TV show that will hear her,” including The View, Dr. Phil and Good Morning America.
PREVIOUSLY, December 14: The once-beloved comedian today says that Tamara Green, Therese Serignese, Linda Traitz, Louisa Moritz, Barbara Bowman, Joan Tarshis, and Angela Leslie cost him his comeback. In a court documents Monday, the widely accused Bill Cosby asserts he “neither drugged nor sexually assaulted” the seven women. In fact, Cosby now is suing them back in federal court in Massachusetts for a wide range of damages and injunctions — including publicly “retracting and correcting” their accusations of sexual assault. And he is convinced it was their words and actions that cost him high-profile gigs on NBC and Netflix.
Source: Deadline
