Bill Cosby is suing Beverly Johnson, one of the women he allegedly attempted to assault, for defamation. Elsewhere, his lawyers are still trying to keep his wife Camille out of a deposition for a different case. Happy holidays, everyone!
On Monday, Cosby’s team of lawyers filed a lawsuit in a Los Angeles Superior Court describing Johnson’s account of the actor’s alleged attempted assault against her as “false, malicious, opportunistic, and defamatory.” According to the New York Daily News, the lawsuit points to Johnson’s recent memoir The Face That Changed It All and accuses her of “maliciously and falsely accusing Mr. Cosby” to gain limelight around her “flagging career as a model, actress and public personality.”
OK.
This lawsuit comes days after Cosby’s team filed another defamation suit against a number of other alleged victims in Massachusetts, including Tamara Green, Therese Serignese, Linda Traitz, Louisa Moritz, Barbara Bowman, Joan Tarshis and Angela Leslie. The suit is in response to their initial defamation suit against him regarding his round dismissal of their various sexual assault allegations against him. Back in Los Angeles, Cosby’s also battling back and forth with Janice Dickinson over her defamation lawsuit against him.
In all of the cases, Cosby’s defense is similar; he didn’t do anything, although he’s already admitted to doing plenty, and these scores of women want to become famous by announcing to the world that something horrible happened to them. Oh, and they ruined Cosby’s chance to revive his aging career on NBC. Sound accurate?
In Massachusetts, according to CNN, an attorney for the aforementioned women has also requested to depose Camille Cosby on January 6. Cosby’s attorneys responded to the request, saying Camille has no “first-hand knowledge” of what her husband was doing all of those years ago and their chats are privileged conversations per Massachusetts’ “spousal disqualification rule.”
However the lawyer representing the seven women countered that Camille was Cosby’s business manager and privy to his life, at home and away. In July, in contrast, the New York Post reported that Camille did acknowledge her husband’s cheating but didn’t believe that he was a serial rapist; she suggested that the women had consented to both drugs and sex.
It’s too late for Camille, potentially. She and Bill married in 1964, when she was 19 years old.
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Image via AP.