Janice Dickinson claims comedian Bill Cosby had sexually assaulted her 32 years ago.
In a new interview with Entertainment Tonight, the supermodel accuses the Cosby Show actor of date rape during an encounter in 1982. Dickinson, now 59, recalls Cosby, now 77, giving her a glass of red wine and a pill, which she had asked for because she was suffering from menstrual cramps at the time, before she had blacked out from the evening.
“The next morning I woke up, and I wasn’t wearing my pajamas, and I remember before I passed out thinking that I had been sexually assaulted by this man,” she says. “Before I woke up in the morning, the last thing I remember was Bill Cosby in a patchwork robe, dropping his robe and getting on top of me. And I remember a lot of pain. The next morning I remember waking up with my pajamas off and there was semen in between my legs.”
Dickinson also claims was pressured by Cosby and his lawyers to not write about the incident in her 2002 autobiography, No Lifeguard on Duty: The Accidental Life of the World’s First Supermodel. According her, she removed it from her first draft to HarperCollins.
“I’m doing this because it’s the right thing to do, and it happened to me, and this is the true story,” she says about speaking out now. “I believe all the other women.”
“Stuffing feelings of rape and my unresolved issued with this incident has drove me into a life of trying to hurt myself because I didn’t have counsel and I was afraid,” she continues. “I was afraid of the consequences. I was afraid of being labeled a whore or a slut and trying to sleep my way to the top of a career that never took place.”
Dickinson is the third woman to come forward with a sexual assault accusation against Cosby. Former publicist Joan Tarshis and Barbara Bowman, who wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post last week detailing her alleged assault, have previously spoken out about alleged rapes that took place between 1969 to 1985.
In light of the mounting sexual assault allegations, Cosby’s attorney, John P. Schmitt, has recently issued a statement, reading:
Over the last several weeks, decade-old, discredited allegations against Mr. Cosby have resurfaced. The fact they are being repeated does not make them true. Mr. Cosby does not intend to dignify these allegations with any comment. He would like to thank all his fans for the outpouring of support and assure them that, at age 77, he is doing his best work. There will be no further statement from Mr. Cosby or any of his representatives.
See more from Dickinson’s in-depth interview — below.
