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Bill Cosby

Two accusers join defamation suit against Cosby

Maria Puente
USA TODAY
Bill Cosby in November 2013.

Bill Cosby's legal opponents grew in number Tuesday when two women who accuse him of raping them in decades past joined a defamation lawsuit against the under-siege comedian.

Therese Serignese and Linda Traitz, both of Florida, have joined a lawsuit filed by Joseph Cammarata, the lawyer who sued Bill Clinton in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case, on behalf of Cosby accuser Tamara Green.

All three women claim to be sexual assault victims of Cosby; all three assert that Cosby, by denying their allegations, called them liars and thus defamed them.

Serignese, now 57 and a nurse, was 19 and an aspiring model when, she says, Cosby drugged and raped her after a show in Las Vegas in 1976. She was one of a dozen Cosby accusers who agreed to testify in a civil suit filed by another woman against Cosby in 2006. But she never got the chance because that suit was settled out of court.

Traitz, now 63, claims that in 1970, when she was 19, Cosby sexually assaulted her on a Florida beach after she declined his offer of drugs he took from "a briefcase of pills." She came forward with her allegations in November on her Facebook page, which has since disappeared.

The defamation lawsuit is an unusual legal strategy employed by Cammarata as a means, he says, to possibly determine the truth or falsity of accusations against Cosby that recently resurfaced.

Therese Serignese, who accuses Bill Cosby of sexual assault, in November 2014 at her home in Boca Raton, Fla.

More than two dozen women have gone public in recent months with claims that Cosby was a serial rapist who drugged them and assaulted them in episodes dating to the 1960s and 1970s.

In most of these cases, the statute of limitations has expired; Cosby has never been charged with a crime.

Through his lawyers, Cosby continues to deny the accusations but they remain hanging over him, unproven and unresolved.

Thus, the defamation lawsuit. It was filed last month in Massachusetts (near where Cosby lives) by Green, who has been making public allegations against Cosby since 2005. She recently joined the chorus of accusers appearing in the media now that the allegations are under new scrutiny.

"This suit allows these women to finally have their day in court against Mr. Cosby in a forum where truth can be tried," said Cammarata in a statement Tuesday. "These women claim to have been defamed after coming forward with their allegations and deserve the opportunity to have their stories heard."

At least one other lawsuit, besides the 2006 one that was settled, has been filed against Cosby in connection with the allegations, by a woman who claims he raped her at the Playboy Mansion 40 years ago when she was a teen. But so far that one doesn't seem to be going anywhere.

Cosby, meanwhile, is continuing his current tour, including three shows in Canada this week that will go on despite threats of protests inside and outside the venues or half-empty houses, according to the Associated Press.

Some of Cosby's shows elsewhere in the USA have been canceled in the wake of the resurfaced allegations, while at other concerts he received ovations.

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