Bill Cosby Accuser Tamara Green Files Defamation Lawsuit

Tamara Green, a retired California attorney who says Bill Cosby drugged and groped her in 1969 or 1970, filed a defamation lawsuit against the entertainer Wednesday.

In the suit, filed in Springfield, Massachusetts, not far from where Cosby has a home, Green says comments made by Cosby’s representatives to The Washington Post and Newsweek this year “impugned” her reputation and exposed her to “public contempt, ridicule, aversion or disgrace.”

She filed the suit to “restore her good name and reputation” her attorney, Joseph Cammarata, tells PEOPLE exclusively.

“That’s all we’ve got in life at the end of the day,” he says. “It’s the most important thing we have.”

Other women Cosby has made public comments about are welcome to join the lawsuit, he says.

Martin Singer, one of Cosby’s attorneys, told PEOPLE: “We are very confident that we will prevail in this proceeding and we will pursue claims against the attorneys who filed this action.”

Walter Phillips Jr., one of Cosby’s attorneys, told the Post Cosby didn’t know Green and the allegations were untrue.

A person identified only as Cosby’s publicist, who is named in the court papers as David Brokaw, told Newsweek in February, “This is a 10-year discredited accusation that proved to be nothing at the time, and is still nothing.”

Her Lawyer Speaks Out

Because the statute of limitations is one year for defamation, Green is only suing him for those statements to those two publications, Cammarata says.

“She says that because of their public branding of her as a liar, it’s called into question her good name and reputation,” Cammarata says.

“At the core of whether or not she’s a liar is if what she says happened, happened,” he says. “If it happened and Bill Cosby said she was a liar, then my client wins. If it’s the other way around, Mr. Cosby wins.”

Green, 66, first came forwardto the Philadelphia Daily News in February 2005, after former Temple employee Andrea Constand, 32, went to authorities saying Cosby had drugged and sexually assaulted her at his Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, mansion.

Green, who now lives in southern California, recently told PEOPLE coming forward ten years ago had repercussions for her.

“People I knew looked me right in the face and told me they didn’t believe me,” she says. “It’s crushing to be dismissed like that.”

“It has ended some relationships for me,” she says. “When the smoke cleared and the blood dried, I moved to a piece of land that had about an acre between me and the front gate. No bell either.”

“In their opinion, you’re a liar and it doesn’t bother them at all that they have no idea what they’re talking about,” she added.

• With additional reporting by ELIZABETH LEONARD