Bill Cosby Slams “Epic” Settlement With Janice Dickinson By “Egregious” Insurance Company
Janice Dickinson has received a “very large settlement” to her four-year defamation case against Bill Cosby, the ex-America’s Next Top Model judge’s lawyer said today. But the imprisoned man once known as America’s Dad is not happy about it at all.
Calling AIG the “worst and egregious insurance company in America’s history,” representatives for Cosby said Thursday that “this is the third example in recent months of AIG robbing Mr. Cosby of the opportunity to clear his name in a court of law, where evidence and truthfulness are supposed to be elevated above headlines and gossip.”
“AIG’s apparent strategy to have Mr. Cosby tried exclusively in the court of public opinion has become clear, and its decision to settle each of these lawsuits over Mr. Cosby’s objections is illustrative of AIG’s bad faith,” the statement on behalf of officially labeled sexual predator Cosby continues. “To be clear, AIG’s settlement of this lawsuit has no bearing whatsoever on the merit of Ms. Dickinson’s claims.”
Having fought Cosby up and down the California court system and given “prior bad acts” testimony last year in his criminal retrial for the 2004 rape of Andrea Constand, Dickinson and her team have a very different POV on what they see as a clear victory.
“Truthfully, a settlement is a victory and certainly a measure of justice, and helps me sleep better, but in reality, nothing can ever erase the experience and memories of an assault,” she reveled today. “Jail is where he belongs, but there aren’t enough years left for him to pay for what he has done to so many women.”
With details familiar to dozens of other allegations against Cosby over the decades, Dickinson claims the actor raped her in 1982 in Lake Tahoe. While the statute of limitations prevented criminal charges from being pursued, Dickinson went the civil route based on Cosby’s then-longtime lawyer Marty Singer declaring that the incident never happened. He also branded Dickinson a “liar” in November 2014 to media outlets when she brought up the incident. Kicking off years of legal battles, Dickinson formally took the matter to court in May 2015, and in November of that year she filed an amended complaint that named Singer a defendant.
The lawyer later was removed from the case, then added again after an October 2017 Court of Appeal ruling that was followed in April 2018 with agreement from the Golden State’s Supreme Court. When the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the matter for Cosby last October, the writing was on the wall toward either a trial or today’s conclusion.
“This amount means that Janice will be fully and fairly compensated for being branded a liar,” high-profile attorney and ex-Harvey Weinstein lawyer Lisa Bloom said of the confidential agreement with AIG in the matter. “She is free to tell her story whenever and wherever she chooses. That was important. The only confidentiality we agreed to was as to the settlement amount. So I can’t tell you the number, but I can say that it is an epic amount that is a powerful statement from Cosby’s own insurance company that Janice had the winning case.”
In a move to get Cosby behind it, the insurance company came to an agreement with seven women in a long-running defamation lawsuit against in early April. That was quickly followed by a deal late that same month, with Chloe Goins over an alleged assault at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles in 2008 when the accuser was 18. In both cases, Cosby repudiated the settlements publicly with venom and vinegar.
Having been sentenced to up to a decade behind bars in Pennsylvania last year for the assault against former Temple University employee Constand, Cosby has been on a near-constant tirade from state prison against his sentence, the judge in the case, the five “bad prior acts” witnesses such as Dickinson and virtually everything else as he attempts to recast himself as a political prisoner. Motions and proclamations to be let out and to get a new trial have fallen on deaf ears so far.
