Bill Cosby hired private investigators to investigate women who claimed comedian raped them

Comedian has reportedly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to scour the women’s pasts in a bid to discredit his accusers

This counter-attacking strategy is not new to Hollywood scandals generally, nor to Mr Cosby in particular (GETTY)

Bill Cosby hired private investigators to “dig up dirt” on several women who claimed the comedian had raped them, according to a report by the New York Post. More than two dozen women have come forward in recent weeks to allege that Mr Cosby, 77, drugged and sexually assaulted them between the 1960s and 2000s.

But Mr Cosby has reportedly been fighting back behind the scenes, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to scour the women’s pasts in a bid to discredit his accusers. At a recent meeting of his legal and public relations representatives, an insider told the Post, Mr Cosby said: “If you’re going to say to the world that I did this to you, then the world needs to know, ‘What kind of person are you? Who is this person that’s saying it?’”

This counter-attacking strategy is not new to Hollywood scandals generally, nor to Mr Cosby in particular. At the weekend, the New York Times also reported that in 2005, the comedian’s team presented a dossier of “damaging information” to one newspaper about Tamara Green, a California lawyer who accused Mr Cosby of having drugged and sexually assaulted her during the 1970s.

The Times described Mr Cosby’s response to his accusers past and present as: “an organised and expensive effort that involved quashing accusations as they emerged while raising questions about the accusers’ character and motives, both publicly and surreptitiously.”

Mr Cosby’s lawyer, Martin Singer, suggested that the investigators were merely doing the work that the press had failed to, telling the Post: “You don’t need private investigators to find out information about the accusers. A simple Google search will obtain the information.”

Mr Cosby himself has avoided addressing specific allegations, but did ask journalists to approach the women’s stories with a “neutral mind”. Though his Netflix stand-up special and an NBC sitcom project were both cancelled in the wake of the accusations, Mr Cosby still has several concert dates in place for the coming months.

On Friday, comedy writer-director Judd Apatow took to Twitter to confront two Canadian venues for not having cancelled Cosby’s coming appearances, asking one: “are you really going to let Bill Cosby perform on your stage January 7?”