Sex just masks evil in men like Wein, Cos

WHEN LILI BERNARD heard the recording of Harvey Weinstein, it stopped her cold.

The actress who claims Bill Cosby raped her in the early 1990s was reading the recent New Yorker exposé on Weinstein and clicked on the audio of his bullying hallway encounter with Filipina-Italian model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez.

“You must come here now,” Weinstein demanded as Battilana Gutierrez resisted entering his private room at the Tribeca Grand Hotel in 2015.

“Don’t embarrass me in the hotel, I’m here all the time,” he barked.

“Five minutes. Don’t ruin your friendship with me for five minutes,” he warned, unaware Battilana Gutierrez had already gone to police and was wearing a wire.

“You could hear the coercion, the intimidation,” Bernard told the Daily News. “It was in parallel to what I experienced with Cosby.”

Bernard is one of dozens of women who have accused Cosby of sexual assault. She said the actor drugged and attacked her three times, including a rape at the Las Vegas Hilton in the fall of 1990.

“When I screamed no, he pushed a pillow in my face. I thought I would die of suffocation,” she told The News.

“I remember his fingers against my mouth and on my teeth,” she recalled. “He kept saying, ‘Shut up Bernard. Shut up.’ ”

Bernard said she and other Cosby “survivors” have been watching Weinstein’s downfall unfold with a sickening sense of déjà vu.

Another celebrated and powerful man allegedly preying on scores of vulnerable young women just starting their careers. Another spiraling scandal with alleged misconduct stretching back decades.

Experts reached by The News declined to diagnose either man as a serial sex predator. But they said serial rapists in positions of power often share many of the same characteristics, including arrogance, aggression, feelings of entitlement and a cult-like following that insulates and encourages them.

“These are the patterns of those who think they are god-like. They tend to be quite grandiose and have that degree of intense self-worship,” forensic psychiatrist Dr. Harold Bursztajn, cofounder of Harvard University’s program in psychiatry and the law, told The News.

He said often, such serial predators are seeking validation for “a fundamental defect they feel,” and “no matter how much they accomplish, the validation is not there.”

“These people are bottomless pits,” he said.

“Ultimately what we’re describing is aggression. It’s not about sex, it’s about aggression and making someone else feel helpless,” he said. “Sex is a mask for the perpetrator. What’s underneath it is a meanness, an aggression, a selfglorification.”

He said whether the abuser is a movie mogul, a priest or any other influential figure, their power