Bill Cosby has been ordered to submit to a deposition in the ongoing defamation suit filed against him by former “America’s Next Top Model” judge Janice Dickinson.
Advertisement
“We are pleased that this morning the court granted our motion to permit us to take the depositions of Bill Cosby and his attorney, Martin Singer, forthwith”, Bloom said in a statement.
Dickinson sued Cosby in May, claiming she has been re-victimized and her reputation has suffered because of denials by Cosby’s attorney that the comedian drugged and raped her in a Lake Tahoe hotel room more than 30 years ago.
Bill Cosby and his ex-lawyer will have to explain under oath why they branded former model Janice Dickinson a liar.
But Weintraub said Dickinson’s lawyer can only seek to find out whether the denials by Cosby and Singer were done maliciously – and said both will be allowed to assert attorney-client privilege when they refuse to answer a few questions.
Cosby’s lawyer Christopher Tayback declined comment after the hearing. Singer responded in a statement to the media calling Dickinson’s story “an outrageous defamatory lie” and “completely fabricated”.
“Truth is a defense in a defamation case”, Bloom says. “I basically said, ‘Listen, we can’t include that in the book”.
Cosby has denied all wrongdoing and has not been charged with a crime, and most of the accusations against him are so old that criminal charges are barred. Huth claims that Cosby sexually assaulted her at the Playboy Mansion in 1974, when she was 15.
Neither Cosby, 78, nor Dickinson, 60, were in the courtroom when Weintraub issued her ruling.
Cosby’s lawyer argued in their anti-SLAPP motion that Dickinson’s lawyers would have to prove malice. He was also sued for defamation in 2006 by Andrea Constand, a Temple University worker who accused Cosby of abusing her. “In other words, either the rape did occur or it did not occur, and in this regard Ms. Dickinson is either telling the truth or not telling the truth”.
Advertisement
In a separate matter, Cosby was deposed last month in Boston, Massachusetts, about his alleged serial doping and groping of young women.
