Janice Dickinson is joining two other women in claiming she was raped by Bill Cosby.
The 59-year-old supermodel told Entertainment Tonight in an interview Tuesday that she was sexually assaulted by the comedian in 1982.
Dickinson said she first met Cosby at a dinner meeting to discuss a role on The Cosby Show. Weeks later, he allegedly called her while she was recovering in a rehab facility. Following her stay in rehab, Cosby again allegedly called her and asked her to leave a trip in Bali to come to Lake Tahoe, where he was performing. According to Dickinson, he wanted to offer her the job and help her with her singing career.
Dickinson alleges that he gave her a glass of red wine and a pill she asked for during dinner because of menstrual cramps.
“The next morning I woke up, and I wasn’t wearing my pajamas, and I remember before I passed out that I had been sexually assaulted by this man,” she told ET. “… 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.”
Janice Dickinson joins other women in accusing Bill Cosby of sexual assault http://t.co/XIsoqZoVvV pic.twitter.com/PKQEX4BJsS
— RTV6 Indianapolis (@rtv6) November 19, 2014
Dickinson said she tried to write about it in her 2002 autobiography No Lifeguard on Duty: The Accidental Life of the World’s First Supermodel, but claims that she and publisher Harper Collins were pressured by Cosby and his lawyers to remove the account from the book.
“I’m doing this because it’s the right thing to do, and it happened to me, and this is the true story,” she said. “I believe all the other women.”
Janice Dickinson comes forward with sexual assault allegations against Bill Cosby: http://t.co/nAMR1FjFa9 pic.twitter.com/KC5Ef1GIwM
— EntertainmentTonight (@etnow) November 18, 2014
Dickinson told ET the memories of the alleged incident and keeping it a secret for 32 years was detrimental to her health and well-being.
“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 said. “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.”
After years of keeping the details a secret, she doesn’t hesitate to express her real feelings now about the alleged encounter.
“How dare you,” she said. “Go f*ck yourself. How dare you take advantage of me. And I hope you rot.”
Bill Cosby's Lawyer Blasts Janice Dickinson's Sexual Assault Claims as 'Outrageous,' 'Def… http://t.co/hJVPNS34Fq pic.twitter.com/ibb8VOnnEg
— TheWrap (@TheWrap) November 19, 2014
While Cosby has remained silent, his attorney is having none of it and fired back at Dickinson’s accusations.
In a letter to TheWrap, Cosby’s attorney, Marty Singer, said the accusations were ludicrous, citing a passage from Dickinson’s autobiography and a 2002 interview with the New York Observer, in which Dickinson purportedly claimed that Cosby “blew her off” after dinner because she didn’t sleep with him.
“Her new story claiming that she had been sexually assaulted is a defamatory fabrication,” Singer wrote.
As to claims Cosby pressured Dickinson and her publisher to remove inflammatory copy, Singer said those accusations are lies.
“Neither Mr. Cosby or any of his attorneys were ever told by Harper Collins that Ms. Dickinson had supposedly planned to write that he had sexually assaulted her, and neither Mr. Cosby or any of his representatives ever communication [sic] with the publisher about any alleged rape or sexual assault about the book,” Singer said.