The day before Bill Cosby’s chief accuser was to take the witness stand at his sexual assault retrial, a former model and TV personality gave jurors her own harrowing account of being d
The day before Bill Cosby’s chief accuser was to take the witness stand at his sexual assault retrial, a former model and TV personality gave jurors her own harrowing account of being drugged and raped by the comedy star in 1982.
Janice Dickinson, one of five other accusers who testified against Mr Cosby, told jurors the comedian gave her a pill he claimed would ease her menstrual cramps but instead left her immobilised and unable to stop an assault she called „gross“.
„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,“ Ms Dickinson said. „I was thinking how wrong it was. How very wrong it was.“
Ms Dickinson’s testimony helped prosecutors tee up a climactic courtroom appearance by Andrea Constand, the former Temple University women’s basketball administrator whom Cosby is charged with drugging and molesting at his suburban Philadelphia mansion in 2004. Constand was expected to testify yesterday – her second time before a jury after Mr Cosby’s first trial ended without a verdict.
Mr Cosby says his sexual encounter with Constand was consensual, asserting through his lawyers that she set him up to score a big pay day. Mr Cosby settled her civil suit for $3.4m (¤2.75m) in 2006.
On Thursday, it was Ms Dickinson’s turn to tell jurors Mr Cosby had taken advantage of her after knocking her out with drugs. She said he smelled of cigars and espresso as he got on top of her in his Lake Tahoe, Nevada, hotel room.
Dickinson, 27 at the time, testified she felt vaginal pain and, after waking up the next morning, noticed semen between her legs.
„I wanted to punch him in the face,“ she said.
A former reality TV personality who has called herself the „world’s first supermodel“, Ms Dickinson became one of the first women to go public with her allegations against Mr Cosby on TV in 2014.
She said Mr Cosby invited her to Lake Tahoe after an initial meeting at his New York townhouse, where he had given her an acting manual.
He then asked her to Lake Tahoe „to further talk about my career“. There, suffering cramps, Mr Cosby gave her a little blue pill and she became woozy and „slightly out of it“.
Mr Cosby told her: „We’ll continue this conversation upstairs.“
Ms Dickinson had a Polaroid camera with her, she said, and snapped photos of Mr Cosby in the room wearing a colourful robe and talking on the telephone. Then Mr Cosby pounced.
„His robe opened up. I couldn’t move. I didn’t fly to Tahoe to have sex with Mr Cosby,“ she said.
