Janice Dickinson Wins Battle In Bill Cosby Defamation Suit

LOS ANGELES (CNS) - A state appeals court panel Tuesday allowed former supermodel Janice Dickinson's defamation lawsuit against Bill Cosby to proceed and also reinstated the comedian's former attorney as a defendant.

The three-justice panel of the 2nd District Court of Appeal upheld Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Debre Katz Weintraub's rejection of Cosby's motion to dismiss the lawsuit, but reversed her decision that removed lawyer Martin Singer from the case.

Cosby's lawyers maintained in their appeal that Weintraub erred in March 2016 when she denied their motion to dismiss Dickinson's lawsuit in its entirety on free-speech grounds. Weintraub granted part of the motion, but allowed the thrust of Dickinson's lawsuit to move forward against the 80-year- old comedian.

Dickinson appealed the part of the case that Weintraub dismissed, as well as the judge's February 2016 ruling that eliminated Singer from the case.

Dickinson sued Cosby in May 2014, saying she had been re-victimized and her reputation had suffered because of denials by Singer of her allegations that his then-client drugged and raped her in a Lake Tahoe hotel room more than 30 years ago.

"That Cosby, through Singer, repeatedly characterized Dickinson's rape allegations as fabrication ... was (at) the heart of the statements," Justice Laurence Rubin wrote in authoring the 53-page opinion. "The statements were made in response to Dickinson's allegations that Cosby had raped her. The statements never said, as a general proposition, that Dickinson was unreliable and untruthful; instead, the statements repeatedly and unconditionally asserted that Dickinson lied about Cosby having raped her."

Cosby's lawyer, Alan Greenberg, told the justices during oral arguments on Oct. 26 that Singer did what any attorney would do in his situation by standing up for his client and doing so within the parameters of the First Amendment.

Greenberg said Dickinson's rape allegations, which she made during media interviews in 2014, contradicted what she wrote in a book years earlier.

Rubin said during the arguments that Cosby and Singer might have avoided the suit if the lawyer had written the denial more carefully. But the bluntness of the denial and the challenge of Dickinson's credibility made it appear that rather than expressing an opinion, Singer was stating facts that can be proven true or false, Rubin said.

Dickinson filed an amended complaint in November 2015, adding Singer as a defendant. Weintraub ruled that Dickinson could not revise the complaint to add Singer because the model was aware of the lawyer's alleged comments before the original lawsuit was filed.

Singer's legal team maintained that Dickinson's attorneys were barred from amending the original case and adding their client as a defendant while a hearing was pending on Cosby's motion to dismiss the original lawsuit. Cosby fired Singer in October 2015.

Dickinson, 62, is one of dozens of women who have accused Cosby of sexual assault.

The comedian was not charged with a crime until December 2015, when he was charged in Pennsylvania with aggravated indecent assault. Prosecutors allege he sexually assaulted Andrea Constand, a former Temple University employee, in January 2004 after plying her with drugs and wine. The first trial ended in a mistrial; a retrial is pending.

By BILL HETHERMAN, City News Service; (Photo by Rich Fury/Getty Images)