Cosby team's strategy: Hush accusers, smear their reputation, blast the media

Los Angeles

IN 2005, when Tamara Green told the Today show and The Philadelphia Inquirer that Bill Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted her in the early 1970s, one of Cosby's lawyers publicly branded the allegations "absolutely false", while his aides approached another newspaper with "damaging information" about her, according to court documents.

Five years earlier, after an actress on Cosby's TV series Cosby told the police that he had tried to put her hand down his sweatpants at his New York town house, Cosby's lawyers threatened The National Enquirer with a US$250 million defamation suit for publishing detailed comments about the incident by the woman's relatives.

And when Cosby acknowledged an extramarital affair in a 1997 interview with Dan Rather, his agent telephoned the president of CBS Entertainment to demand that the segment not air on 60 Minutes as planned. It did not, although CBS News said that the decision had no…