Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Model Janice Dickinson tells jury Cosby raped her in 1982
It wasn’t a runway but the red carpet of a courtroom that model and reality star Janice Dickinson walked as she prepared to testify that actor Bill Cosby raped her during a 1982 meeting in his hotel room in Lake Tahoe, Nevada.
“He got on top of me and his robe opened. He smelled like cigars and espresso and his body odor. I remember his breath. I remember tasting his kiss. It was gross,” Dickinson, now 63, testified on Thursday as spectators in the Montgomery County courtroom gallery appeared to hang on her every word. “I hadn’t consented to this. I hadn’t said, ‘Yes.’”
Dickinson, a celebrity known for her stint as a judge on “America’s Next Top Model,” said she thought to herself at the time, “Here’s America’s Dad on top of me and a married man with five children. I remember how very wrong it was.”
Dickinson, then 27, claimed she passed out during the incident and awoke the next morning in her own hotel room and examined her body and found signs that she had been sexually assaulted.
“I was in shock, in disbelief about what happened to me,” Dickinson testified, adding she later confronted Cosby by telling him, “That’s not cool.” She said Cosby looked at her “like I was crazy.”
“I wanted to hit him. I wanted to punch him in the face,” Dickinson testified.
Cosby showed no reaction to Dickinson’s testimony.
Dickinson is one of five women, who have accused Cosby of sexual misconduct between the years 1982 and 1996, and who District Attorney Kevin R. Steele called as witnesses during the first four days of Cosby’s retrial on charges he sexually assaulted one woman, Andrea Constand, in 2004.
Dickinson testified she met Cosby in Lake Tahoe, at his invitation, for a meeting to discuss her musical and acting career.
“He tried to get me to fly
economy. I said, ‘No, I will not. I fly first class,’” Dickinson testified, drawing laughs from some courtroom observers.
During a musical mentoring session, Dickinson claimed Cosby “grimaced” when he heard her sing and “put his fingers in his ears.” Dickinson, whose testimony was peppered with numerous names of rich and famous entertainers and fashion designers, said Cosby and his representatives suggested she could be an entertainer like Susan Anton, a popular singer at the time.
“I didn’t really want to be Susan Anton. I’m thinking more like Meryl Streep,” Dickinson, who wore a black pant suit and white blouse to court, quipped.
While at dinner after the mentoring session, Dickinson said she began complaining about menstrual cramps.
“Cosby said, ‘I have something for that,’” adding she was handed a round pill and while she didn’t know what the pill was she took it anyway. “After taking the pill, I started to feel woozy and dizzy. I was slightly out of it.”
Dickinson claimed Cosby suggested they continue their conversation in his hotel room and she followed him there and sat on the edge of his bed. After she snapped several Polaroid photos of Cosby in a multicolored bathrobe taking a phone call, she claimed that’s when he approached her and sexually assaulted her.
Asked by Assistant District Attorney M. Stewart Ryan why she never reported the allegation to police, Dickinson claimed, “I was very successfully working … I finally made it. I was famous as a model. I had conservative clients … that would not appreciate the fact I had been raped and gone to police and reported the crime … and that’s why I didn’t go to police.”
Armed with a copy of Dickinson’s 2002 memoir “No Lifeguard On Duty,” Thomas Mesereau Jr., Cosby’s lead defense lawyer, attacked Dickinson’s credibility, pointing out she never mentioned being raped by Cosby in the book. In the memoir, Mesereau said, Dickinson wrote that Cosby slammed the door in her face at the hotel and that she went back to her room, popped quaaludes and went to bed.
“You tell a completely different story about your meeting with Bill Cosby in this book, don’t you? You say in this book that you didn’t have sex with him at all,” Mesereau confronted Dickinson during one heated exchange.
“That’s what’s written,” Dickinson responded, suggesting events in the book were embellished, described with “poetic license” and that she published it because she needed a paycheck to support her family. “It doesn’t make a difference what I said in the book. I wasn’t under oath when I wrote that book.”
Dickinson implied to Mesereau she told the ghost writer who penned the book about the alleged raped but it wasn’t included in the book because people told her “it would never get past Cosby’s legal team.” Dickinson added Cosby is “a powerful guy” who could have ruined her career.
“So you lied (in the memoir) to get a paycheck?” Mesereau pressed Dickinson.
“I don’t lie, sir. Don’t call me a liar,” Dickinson shot back, dramatically, adding she was telling the truth while under oath in court. “He raped me in Tahoe. I was drugged.”
Dickinson did concede that after she used cocaine for three days in 1982 she spent a stint in a drug rehab, where she claimed Cosby called her and sent her red roses.
Dickinson, who is represented by civil rights lawyer Lisa Bloom, added later, “My life is fantastic.”
When she concluded her testimony as a prosecution witness, Dickinson turned to Judge Steven T. O’Neill and said, “I think you’ve been great.”
A fifth woman, Maud Lise-Lotte Lublin, of Las Vegas, testified Cosby acted inappropriately with her in his hotel room where he was supposed to give her acting advice in 1989. She recalled Cosby gave her two alcoholic drinks “to relax” and she began feeling dizzy.
Cosby, Lublin testified, then had her sit on a couch between his legs, her back against him, and he began stroking her hair.
“It wasn’t appropriate and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t understand why he was touching me and I couldn’t do anything about it,” Lublin told prosecutor Kristen Feden, adding her next memory is waking up in her own home two days later, not knowing what happened after she passed out in Cosby’s hotel room.
“But I believe I know what it was. There was a purpose for me to blackout,” Lublin added.
Constand is expected to testify within the next several days.
Cosby faces three counts of aggravated indecent assault in connection with allegations he had inappropriate sexual contact with Constand, a former Temple University athletic department employee, at his Cheltenham home after plying her with blue pills and wine sometime between mid-January and mid-February 2004.