UPDATED, 5:03 PM: The strategy of Bill Cosby’s new lawyers is becoming clear: attack the accusers. With dozens and dozens of women alleging that the comedian sexually assaulted or drugged them over the decades, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan today went after Beverly Johnson for defamation. This comes less than a week after Cosby’s team did the same thing to seven women in federal court in Massachusetts. 
 
 Today’s filing against model and actress Johnson in Los Angeles Superior Court (read it here) seeks punitive damages and an injunction preventing her from “continuing to publish her defamatory statements.” Johnson said, initially in a Vanity Fair article and in subsequent interviews, that Cosby drugged her with spiked cappucino at his New York home during the 1980s. It claims she “is no stranger to making salacious allegations even before her false allegations about Mr.Cosby. She previously made allegations of abuse against two of her boyfriends, neither of which resulted in charges or any finding of liability.” It adds that Johnson “has repeated her lies about Mr. Cosby drugging her to every media publication, newspaper, magazine or TV show that will hear her,” including The View, Dr. Phil and Good Morning America. 
 
 PREVIOUSLY, December 14: The once-beloved comedian today says that Tamara Green, Therese Serignese, Linda Traitz, Louisa Moritz, Barbara Bowman, Joan Tarshis, and Angela Leslie cost him his comeback. In a court documents Monday, the widely accused Bill Cosby asserts he “neither drugged nor sexually assaulted” the seven women. In fact, Cosby now is suing them back in federal court in Massachusetts for a wide range of damages and injunctions — including publicly “retracting and correcting” their accusations of sexual assault. And he is convinced it was their words and actions that cost him high-profile gigs on NBC and Netflix. 
 
 “Each Counterclaim Defendant induced both NBC and Netflix to postpone or cancel their contracts with Mr. Cosby by engaging in a campaign to assassinate Mr. Cosby’s reputation and character by willfully, maliciously, and falsely accusing Mr. Cosby of multi-decade-old purported sexual misconduct in an opportunistic attempt to extract financial gain from their allegations,” states the counterclaim filing today from Cosby (read it here), who is scheduled to give depositions in the case soon. 
 
 A week before it was set to premiere, Netflix pulled the plugged on an already filmed special with Cosby on November 18, 2014, as the allegations of rape, drugging and more began to rise and rise. The next day, on November 19, NBC, the former home of The Cosby Show, hit halt on a proposed family sitcom with Cosby. Just days later, Cosby’s now-former lawyer Marty Singer called the then-recent accusations from the women in this case “the latest example of people coming out of the woodwork with unsubstantiated or fabricated stories about my client.” Such statements became the basis of the defamation case going on now in New England. 
 
 A case that today Cosby not only denied but flipped around to be about him. 
 
 “Counterclaim Defendants’ false statements were defamatory because they held Mr. Cosby up to hatred, distrust, contempt, disgrace, scorn, and ridicule among considerable and respectable segments of the community, including from the media coverage and public reaction to Counterclaim Defendants’ false and defamatory statements,” the 89-page filing adds. Of course, the part of the risk that Cosby is taking here is he may be required to testify in this case and could find himself answering some very tough questions and accusations under oath. 
 
 “If anyone is surprised by Cosby’s actions today, they shouldn’t be,” said the accusers’ lawyer Joseph Cammarata Monday “He’s taken a page out of the defense attorney’s playbook in an effort to shift the focus of this legitimate inquiry. It is curious that he has filed a claim only against these seven women, when there are scores of other women who have made similar allegations of sexual abuse and assault against Mr. Cosby. My clients remain resolute in their desire to have their day in court, sooner rather than later, and they each expect that their good name and reputation will be restored.” 
 
 Today also saw Cosby stripped of yet another honorary degree, this time from Boston University. With more than 50 women now accusing Cosby of sexual assault, the school said his alleged actions “demonstrates that his character fails to reflect the integrity and virtues that the university values and esteems.” 
 
 This comes as Cosby battles to stop already ordered depositions by himself and Singer in a defamation case by Janice Dickinson. The former America’s Next Top Model judge alleges that Cosby raped her in 1982 and that Singer branded her a “liar” last year when she brought the incident up. Dickinson took the matter to court in May, and in the fall she filed an amended complaint now formally naming Singer a defendant. “Having been unsuccessful in his attempt to get the Massachusetts accusers’ claims thrown out, Bill Cosby’s next aggressive legal move is to countersue them,” noted Dickinson’s attorney Lisa Bloom today. “At least this ensures that the accusers will get the day in court they have been seeking.” 
 
 As the LosAngeles D.A. continues to review a LAPD investigation of claims that Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted then-18-year-old model Chloe Goins at a party at the Playboy Mansion in 2008, another potentially damning deposition could become public soon. The comic gave several sworn hours of testimony in October in Boston in the civil case of Judy Huth, who claims Cosby molested her at the Playboy Mansion in 1974 when she was 15. Like the explosive and now-unsealed 2005 deposition in the Andrea Constand case, where Cosby admitted to having prescriptions for Quaaludes in the 1970s and that he intended to give those pills to women he wanted to have sex with, the Huth deposition could become public next week. That’s all a matter of if the judge in the once-Singer-conducted case deems that material private or not. 
 
 In the case that saw the countersuit today and seeks a wide ranging confidentiality agreement and protective order, Cosby is represented by a legion of lawyers from L.A. firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP and Springfield MA’s Egan, Flanagan & Cohen, PC. ||||| CLOSE Three more women have come forward with allegations of sexual assault against Bill Cosby. Now, more than 40 women have made that claim. Video provided by Newsy Newsy 
 
 Gloria Allred with three new accusers of Bill Cosby, Colleen Hughes (L), Linda Ridgeway Whitedeer (2nd R) and actress Eden Tirl (R), on Aug. 12 in Los Angeles. (Photo: Kevork Djansezian/ Getty Images) 
 
 Three more women joined the list Wednesday of nearly 50 women who have publicly accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault. 
 
 Crusading women's-rights lawyer Gloria Allred, one of Cosby's most persistent legal foes, introduced three new clients who claimed to have been abused by Cosby, at a press conference in her Los Angeles office where she has introduced Cosby accusers multiple times before. 
 
 The new accusers include two actors and one flight attendant. In introducing them, Allred alluded to the recent New York Magazine cover of three dozen Cosby accusers and one empty chair, symbolizing all the accusers who have not stepped forward publicly. 
 
 "It is my turn to take the empty chair, " said Linda Ridgeway Whitedeer, a former actress, weeping a little in Allred's office. 
 
 Whitedeer said she met Cosby through her ex-husband who was an executive at Cosby's agency, the William Morris Agency. In 1971, she said, Cosby of forced her into oral sex in a lightning-quick attack minutes after she went into an empty room with him on a movie set and sat down in a chair. She said he grabbed the back of her head by her hair. 
 
 Linda Ridgeway Whitedeer, actor. In 1971 #billcosby 'shoved his penis in my mouth' during interview. pic.twitter.com/gTS6rLismg — Rory Carroll (@rorycarroll72) August 12, 2015 
 
 Afterward "he was mumbling that I had been blessed with his semen as if it were holy water," she said. "He gloated over my humiliation. He had planned it. I was in shock." 
 
 She said she never told anyone because she promised her ex not to do anything to embarrass him, because Cosby was too powerful in the industry and because she was worried about upsetting Cosby's wife, Camille, who was pregnant at the time. 
 
 Cover of 'New York Magazine' on July 27, 2015 (Photo: AMANDA DEMME / HANDOUT, EPA) 
 
 Colleen Hughes, a former American Airlines flight attendant, says she met Cosby on a flight in the early 1970s, and agreed to go to lunch with him. While she freshened up in a hotel room, he ordered Champagne, then gave her some. She woke up hours later covered in semen, she says, and Cosby was gone. 
 
 She saw him again on another flight about a year later, he flirted with her again, apparently not recognizing her. She warned him to stay away from her fellow flight attendants or she would report him. 
 
 "I've lived my whole life with this terrible secret about Bill and what he did to me," she said. "I never told anyone." 
 
 Eden Tirl, an actress, accused Cosby of sexually harassing her — grabbing her and hugging her in an overly intimate and yet intimidating way — when she appeared on The Cosby Show during the fifth season in 1989. She was an admirer of Cosby from childhood, and praised him and the show for putting black and mixed-race Americans, like herself, on previously all-white American TV. 
 
 But after her encounter with Cosby, she said, she did not report him because she feared his power to ruin her career. "It took 39 other women to come forward before I was ready to share my experience" publicly, she said. 
 
 The latest tally of Cosby accusers totals 46, so these three women would bring the number to 49 women who say they were drugged and raped by Cosby in episodes going back to the mid-1960s. 
 
 Since the allegations first re-emerged last fall, Cosby has denied all wrongdoing and has not been charged with a crime. Most of the allegations against him are too old to be criminally prosecuted under states' statutes of limitation, but a number of accusers are suing him in civil court. 
 
 Bill Cosby at Temple University on June 4, 2015. (Photo: Matt Rourke, AP) 
 
 Allred represents 21 accusers so far, and the lawsuit she is pursuing for one of them, Judy Huth, is the one most likely to force Cosby to answer questions in a deposition. Huth alleges Cosby sexually molested her at the Playboy Mansion 40 years ago when she was 15, and is suing him for allegedly causing her severe emotional distress. 
 
 Cosby tried to get her lawsuit dismissed, and failed, and now a California judge has ordered him to sit for a deposition on Oct. 9. Allred has promised to grill him, and will seek to make the deposition public. 
 
 Allred also challenged Monique Pressley, Cosby's new lawyer hired to defend him in the media, to a public debate. She described Pressley's recent attempts to defend Cosby on TV as "pathetic" for implying that accusers have no right to speak out decades after what they say happened to them. 
 
 "Instead of trying to change the subject from specific allegations to vague generalizations and truisms about the criminal justice system, I challenge you to debate me," Allred said. "Stand up like a woman and do it and please do not give some ridiculous excuse as to why you cannot accept my challenge." 
 
 Pressley did not respond to the new accusers but in a statement she rejected Allred's challenge. 
 
 "While I do appreciate the temptation that may exist, for some, to turn this matter into a public spectacle, lawyers representing clients resolve matters in court, not debates," she said in the emailed statement. 
 
 A deposition in another, 10-year-old civil suit against Cosby, which was supposed to be sealed but came out partly through court order and partly through a leak, has already severely damaged what was left of Cosby's reputation as a beloved TV dad and role model. In that deposition, Cosby acknowledged seeking drugs to give to women he sought for sex, and described his approach to seducing women in terms widely described as repulsive. 
 
 Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1TrxIwA ||||| Three More Women Come Forward to Accuse Bill Cosby of Sexual Assault 
 
 Three more women have publicly come forward with accusations that Bill Cosby sexually assaulted them in the 1970s and '80s. The three women, including an actress who appeared on The Cosby Show and the former wife of a vice president at the William Morris Agency, joined the more than 40 women who allege they were drugged, sexually assaulted or sexually harassed by the comedian.At a press conference Wednesday, civil rights attorney Gloria Allred, who is now representing more than 21 accusers, said the three women are speaking out now to show their support for other accusers who have been criticized by Cosby's attorneys "There is no statute of limitations on free speech," says Allred. "A person who alleges that she or he is a victim can speak out at any time."Cosby has consistently denied the allegations of sexual assault. His lawyer, Marty Singer, previously said that the claims "about alleged decades-old events are becoming increasingly ridiculous." Singer did not immediately comment on the new allegations.At the press conference Wednesday, Colleen Hughes said she was a young stewardess with American Airlines in the early '70s when she allegedly met Cosby on a flight to Los Angeles. Hughes claimed Cosby flirted with her the entire flight and invited her to lunch in Beverly Hills. She agreed to go, but only with another stewardess. Cosby allegedly had a car and driver waiting for them at the airport but the other stewardess never showed up. Hughes claimed she drove with Cosby to the Fairmont Hotel and he allegedly watched television in her room while she got ready for lunch.When she came out of the bathroom fully dressed, she said Cosby had allegedly ordered a bottle of champagne and was drinking it out of her Gucci pump. She claimed he raised the shoe towards her, and said, "A princess should always drink champagne out of a glass slipper."Hughes said they started watching television and he allegedly tried to hold her hand. The last thing she remembered, she claimed, was waking up around 5:15 p.m. Her clothes were all over the room and she "felt semen on the small of my back and all over me," she claimed."It was disgusting," she said. "Bill obviously did not use a condom and there was no lunch and Bill was nowhere to be seen. I was confused and ashamed and never told anyone about what happened to me."Linda Ridgeway Whitedeer told reporters that at the time of her alleged assault she was the recently divorced wife of Fred Apollo, a vice president and department head of live TV for the William Morris Agency, and who worked closely with the comedian. The former actress, who starred in 1972's The Mechanic with Charles Bronson, claimed she met Cosby on a movie set around 1971. She claimed Cosby told her she was there to be interviewed and then allegedly lured her into the director's office.Once inside, Cosby exposed himself, grabbed her head and shoved his penis in her mouth, Whitedeer alleged."His attack was fast with surgical precision and surprise on his side," she claimed. "When Cosby was done there was a horrible mess of semen all over my face, my clothes and in my hair."Whitedeer said she wanted to go straight to William Morris Agency but changed her mind because she didn't want to embarrass her ex-husband. "An actress is like a tennis player," she said at the press conference. "Her integrity and confidence are everything. For me, Bill Cosby was a career-killer."The third alleged victim, Eden Tiri, said she was a 22-year-old actress when she was given a part playing a cop on The Cosby Show in 1989. While working on the set in front of hundreds of people, she alleged she was led off set to Cosby's dressing room twice but he wasn't there. The third time, Cosby was allegedly waiting for her. Inside the dressing room, she alleged Cosby wrapped his arms around her and whispered in her ear, "See that's all we were going to do, make love. This is making love. He turned me around, hugged me and I left without saying a word."On July 29, a California judge ordered the comedian to give a deposition in the civil suit filed by Allred's client Judy Huth. The deposition is scheduled for Oct. 9."My hope for that deposition is that we will ask questions and he should provide answers," said Allred. "We have a great deal of latitude. We are looking forward to his answers. We are entitled to answers."Huth claimed that Cosby, 78, molested her inside the Playboy Mansion when she was just 15 years old. She is just one of the nearly 50 women who've accused Cosby of some form of sexual abuse.The deposition will be the first time Cosby has spoken about the sexual assault allegations against him since a separate case in 2005. Portions of that deposition were unsealed earlier last month; in the deposition, Cosby admitted he gave Quaaludes to a woman and then had sex with her.
– Details of alleged sexual assaults by Bill Cosby just keep on coming. Today five women describe his purported attacks in blood-curdling detail to the Washington Post, with some saying they were drugged before the encounter and others claiming they screamed, tried fighting him off, or said they would fight him to the death (in that case, he allegedly threw two hundred-dollar bills at model Tamara Green and walked out). Victoria Valentino—an ex-Playboy Playmate speaking up for the first time—says he drugged her and a friend with red pills in 1970. Then he "opened his fly and grabbed my head and pushed my head down. And then he turned me over. It was like a waking nightmare." But she never pressed charges: "What kind of credibility did I have?" Denials by Cosby lawyers pepper the article, as do quotes from a friend, a writer, and a district attorney who say they heard the women's accusations years ago. The Post also looks at Cosby's marriage to Camille Cosby, saying "it’s unclear how much Camille knew about her husband’s activities" since six of the alleged sexual assaults occurred at his house. She was reportedly aware of his "selfish" behavior in Los Angeles, which contrasted with his upstanding life on the East Coast as a man studying for a PhD and sitting on a board at Temple University. Yet even there, a Temple employee accuses him of drugging her with blue pills and sexually assaulting her. In other Cosby news: Ex-NBC employee Frank Scotti tells the Daily News that during the Cosby Show's heyday, he guarded Cosby's dressing-room door while the comedy star hosted young models. Scotti says he then paid off the women with money orders using cash provided by Cosby (he produces the money orders). "He had everybody fooled," says Scotti. "Nobody suspected." When Cosby appeared on the Late Show With David Letterman, he asked female staffers to do an odd thing: watch him eat curry, Gawker reports. A source says staffers hated it but still obliged: "No one would say anything, and he would sit silently eating and make us watch and want us to watch," the source tells the Daily News. Click to read about accusations from Carla Ferrigno, Lou Ferrigno's wife.