Bill Cosby sues Beverly Johnson for defamation

Last week, Cosby filed a countersuit against seven other women who accused him of sexual assault and sued him for defamation.

The lawsuit filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court contends that Johnson falsely accused Cosby of drugging her at his home in NY to have sex with her in an attempt to “revive her flagging career as a model, actress and public personality”.

It seeks unspecified damages and an injunction preventing the model from repeating her claims and requests they be removed from Johnson’s memoir, which was released in August.

Cosby’s lawsuit says he had never spent any time alone with Johnson at his home.

Johnson – famous for being the first black woman to appear on the cover of AmericanVogue in 1974 – alleges that Cosby drugged her cappuccino in the mid-1980s, but that she was able to stave him off, partly by repeatedly calling him a “motherfucker”.

Cosby recently filed a counterclaim for defamation against the seven other women who filed suit in Springfield.

During 2014, dozens of women made public accusations that Cosby sexually assaulted them.

Actor Bill Cosby speaks at the National Action Network’s 20th annual Keepers of the Dream Awards gala in New York April 6, 2011.

According to the sources, the comedian has not been charged with a crime and has denied the decades-old allegations of sexual assault and attempted sexual assaults that have surfaced over the past year.

In a piece for Vanity Fair last November, Johnson recalled an alleged incident from her younger modeling days when she said Cosby drugged her. She said she called him an expletive before managing to get away from the older man.

Cosby’s suit charges in that Johnson, a number one model within the 1970s & ’80s & one of his most high-profile accusers, defamed him & deliberately inflicted emotional distress.

It was then Johnson said that she knew she’d been slipped a drug.

The lawsuit against Johnson, 63, is the latest legal salvo from Cosby, who is a defendant in five civil cases filed in Los Angeles, Massachusetts and Pittsburgh.

There, she went on, he allegedly drugged her coffee – claims she repeated on various TV news programmes, including ABC’s Good Morning America and Nightline.