Bill Cosby hit with another lawsuit, things keep being awful
The revived allegations against Bill Cosby have so far produced a civil lawsuit—from Judy Huth, who claims Cosby molested her when she was 15 years old—and a motion to dismiss that suit and demand $33,295 in sanctions from Huth, filed by Cosby’s lawyer. It’s also produced an official LAPD investigation into Huth’s accusations, in which police will attempt to sift through 40 years’ worth of distant memories and sticky sediment at the Playboy Mansion—though many seem to agree that bringing Cosby to trial on any decades-old allegation will be difficult. (It’s why Gloria Allred proposed an alternate, “just own up and pay everybody” salvo that is even now being taught in the nation’s finest law schools.) But one of his alleged victims has found another tack to try to force Cosby into court: suing him for denying her story.
Cosby has been hit with a defamation suit from Tamara Green, a now-retired attorney who first came forward in 2005 with allegations that Cosby had assaulted her in the 1970s, joining Andrea Costrand’s lawsuit against him, and even participating in an interview that year with a skeptical Matt Lauer on Today. Green’s name surfaced again this past February—many months before these allegations really picked up steam—in a Newsweek interview in which she described the incident and the professional, “career-ender” fallout she experienced after she shared her story.
And now Green is suing for a comment that Newsweek interview carried from Cosby’s publicist calling her allegation “discredited” and “nothing.” She also cites a comment made by his lawyer in a recent Washington Post article that flat-out says Cosby didn’t know Green “and the incident she describes did not happen.”
As a result, Green says that Cosby’s team has “publicly branded” her as a liar, exposing her to “contempt, ridicule, aversion or disgrace” and created an “evil opinion of her in the minds of right-thinking persons,” as well as caused her to be “shunned and avoided” in both her professional and personal dealings. As The Hollywood Reporter notes, it remains to be seen whether a judge will agree that those denials actually amount to Cosby’s reps calling her a liar—or if they do, whether Cosby himself is responsible for them. But it does give some indication of a legal reason why, for all the damage his silence is doing to his public image, Cosby has so steadfastly refused to say anything about the allegations. Though, of course, it’s becoming hard to imagine how he could possibly make this situation worse.
Attesting to that, those allegations have only grown in both size and volume this week, with many of Cosby’s accusers forming ranks to share their stories on TV. Most notably, five of them appeared together for an hour-long CNN special, in which Don Lemon (visibly restraining the urge to suggest more rape-avoidance strategies) and his co-host/handler Alisyn Camerota asked them about their shared experiences. At one point, in what has become one of the defining images of this story, the women were asked how many had been drugged by Bill Cosby. All five raised their hands.
