[Bagor]

The National Enquirer revealed it dropped a 2005 story about rape allegations against Bill Cosby after his lawyers threatened to sue the publication.

Lawyers acting for Bill Cosby cajoled the tabloid magazine the National Enquirer into ditching a groundbreaking investigation it had conducted into his alleged sexual misconduct and replacing it with a celebrity interview in which the comic dismissed the claims as money-motivated “misinterpretations”, the Guardian has learned.

The National Enquirer’s investigation was carried out in 2005, just weeks after it first emerged that Cosby had been accused of drugging and molesting a female friend, Andrea Constand. The tabloid magazine dispatched its senior reporter Robin Mizrahi to look into the story.

Mizrahi made contact with a second woman, Beth Ferrier, who alleged that she too had been drugged and sexually molested by the entertainer. The Enquirer brought Ferrier to Los Angeles from her home in Denver, where she was then working as a model, and Mizrahi interviewed her and arranged for her to undergo a lie detector test.

“She passed the polygraph test with flying colors,” Mizrahi told the Guardian. “She had a very, very detailed description of what allegedly happened which I still remember because it was so haunting. She said Cosby had stood over her and then she fell asleep because there was something in her coffee.”

Mizrahi, a Los Angeles-based writer who left the Enquirer in 2009 having worked there for nine years, filed her story in February 2005 based in large part on Ferrier’s allegations. But she was then informed by her editors that they had decided to kill it after the magazine came under pressure from Cosby’s lawyers, who threatened to sue.

Further details of the exchanges between Cosby’s team and executives at the National Enquirer are given in court documents lodged by Andrea Constand in the course of a civil lawsuit brought by her against Cosby’s lawyer and the magazine. The suit says that the Enquirer “provided a copy of the unpublished Beth Ferrier article to Cosby and his representatives”.

After negotiations between the two sides, carried out at a meeting between them in Houston, Texas, they agreed, according to the lawsuit, that “Cosby would provide an exclusive interview with the National Enquirer, if the National Enquirer would agree to refrain from printing the Beth Ferrier story”. On 21 February 2005 the deal was sealed, with Cosby granting the interview to the magazine.

The Enquirer’s decision to switch its own investigation with a soft-soap interview was reported by Mark Ebner in the Daily Beast this week.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...-investigation