Bill Cosby Sues Beverly Johnson for defamation, she fires back

It appears Bill Cosby is firing back at his accusers one after the other.A week after he filed a defamation lawsuit against 7 of his 40 accusers, he filed another lawsuit Monday against supermodel Beverly Johnson, alleging she lied when she said he drugged and tried to rape her at his New York home in the mid-1980s.


Cosby's lawsuit says Johnson joined other women making accusations against him to revive her waning career and to help sell copies of her memoir.

The lawsuit alleges defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress, saying Cosby and Johnson never spent any time alone in his house, he never drugged her and "her story is a lie."


Johnson, 63, the first African-American supermodel, first made her accusation against Cosby in Vanity Fair magazine in late 2014.

She said that in the mid-1980s, she went to Cosby's residence to work on acting exercises, including one in which she acted drunk, when Cosby asked her to have a drink from his cappuccino machine.

"I knew by the second sip of the drink Cosby had given me that I'd been drugged -- and drugged good," she wrote. Johnson said she struggled so much that Cosby took her out of the house and put her into a cab.

Cosby seeks unspecified damages, an injunction requiring Johnson to retract her statements, removal of the chapter about Cosby in future copies of her memoir and removal of the chapter from unsold copies.