Court dismisses defamation case against Bill Cosby

A federal judge in Massachusetts on Thursday dismissed a defamation lawsuit against Bill Cosby by an actress - who is the former lover of Sammy Davis Jr. - who claimed that Cosby raped her.

The judge ruled that the comedian acted within his rights when he proclaimed himself innocent of the crime.

U.S. District Judge Mark Mastroianni wrote on Thursday that accuser Katherine Mae McKee had not demonstrated that Cosby defamed her simply by denying her claims, made in an interview with the New York Daily News.


'An accused person cannot be foreclosed ... from considering the issuance of a simple and unequivocal denial - free from overall defamatory triggers or contextual themes,' Mastroianni wrote.

In 2014, McKee alleged that Cosby forced himself on her after inviting her to a party on a boat in Detroit. As a radiant young actress, she appeared on Sanford and Son and even a 1971 episode of The Cosby Show.

'It was a rape, but it seemed so strange to call it that. We think of rape as a stranger who attacks you in a parking lot,' McKee told the New York Daily News in 2014.


Read more: Daily Mail