Cosby raped me in ’82, model tells jury
Model Janice Dickinson told a jury Thursday that Bill Cosby raped her in 1982 after giving her a pill he claimed would ease her menstrual cramps but instead left her immobilized and unable to stop an assault she called “gross.”
Dickinson, the fourth accuser to take the witness stand at Cosby’s sex assault retrial, told jurors she was “rendered motionless” by the pill as Cosby got on top of her in his Lake Tahoe, California, hotel room. She said he smelled of cigars and espresso.
“I didn’t consent to this. Here was ‘America’s Dad,’ on top of me. A married man, father of five kids, on top of me,” Dickinson said. “I was thinking how wrong it was. How very wrong it was.” Dickinson, 27 at the time, testified she felt vaginal pain and, after waking up the next morning, noticed semen between her legs. She said Cosby looked at her “like I was crazy” when she con- fronted him about what had happened.
“I wanted to hit him. I wanted to punch him in the face,” she said.
Dickinson, a former model and TV personality, became one of the first women to go public with her allegations against Cosby when she told her story on “Entertainment Tonight” in 2014.
During cross-examination, a defense attorney seized on discrepancies between Dickinson’s testimony and what she wrote about their encounter in her 2002 autobiography.
She told jurors she wanted to include details about the assault, but Cosby and his lawyers pressured her to tell a highly sanitized version in which there was no sex at all, let alone a rape.
Dickinson said she went along because she needed the money — and feared Cosby would ruin her career.
“It’s all a fabrication there. It was written by ghostwriters. I wanted a paycheck,” she said.
Dickinson is one of five additional accusers whom prosecutors are calling to the stand to show Cosby had a history of drugging and molesting women long before he was charged with violating Andrea Constand at his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004.
The 80-year-old comedian says his sexual encounter with Constand was consensual. His first trial ended in a hung jury.
The defense has dismissed the other women’s testimony as “prosecution by distraction.”
“These women proved that they were here to back up their sister — they got their sister’s back,” Cosby spokes- man Andrew Wyatt said outside court Thursday.