In 1982, supermodel Janice Dickinson knew accusing Bill Cosby of rape could end her career.
She was 27 and at the height of her fame when the superstar comedian gave her a pill he said would help her menstrual cramps during dinner at a Lake Tahoe hotel.
But then, she says, he proceeded to force himself on her as she started to black out.
“I felt pain between my legs, vaginal pain. I passed out after he entered me. It was gross,” Dickinson, 63, testified at Cosby’s sex assault trial.
“I remember, here was ‘America’s Dad’ on top of me, a happily married man on top of me with five children.”
At the time, she was working for the biggest magazines and makeup brands in the business, and she knew they “would not appreciate the fact that I had been raped and gone to the police.”
But in court, some 35 years later, Dickinson faced slurs and character assaults once again — this time from Cosby’s lawyers who derided her as “an aged-out model” who has “slept with every man on the planet.”
In that stunning moment, she became the most visible face of Cosby’s more than 60 sex-assault accusers.
And on Thursday, her story — and those of the dozens of other women who came forward, many too late to pursue legal action — were finally vindicated as a jury found Cosby guilty of drugged, forced sexual assault against former Temple University staffer Andrea Constand.
Actress Lili Bernard collapsed in tears as the “guilty” verdict against Cosby was read, and had to be escorted out of the courtroom.
“I feel like I’m dreaming. Can you pinch me? I feel like I’m dreaming. I feel like my faith in humanity is restored,” a weeping Bernard later said on the steps in front of the courthouse.
“This is the victory not just for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, not just for the victim in the case, Andrea Constand, not just for the 62 of us publicly known survivors of Bill Cosby’s drugs-facilitated sexual crimes, but it’s also a victory for all sexual assault survivors, female and male. It’s a victory for womanhood.”
Bernard claims Cosby drugged and raped her while she was a guest star on the final season of “The Cosby Show” in the early 1990s.
She says he offered to mentor her, saying, “You’re one of my kids, Bernard.”
But when she last saw him at the show’s studios in 1992, she claimed he told her, “As far as I’m concerned, Bernard, you’re dead. Do you hear me? You’re dead, Bernard. You don’t exist. I never wanna see your face again. Now get the hell out of here!”
She took that as a death threat, and says she still suffers panic attacks to this day.
She wasn’t the only woman Cosby has been accused of preying on while working on what was then the nation’s most popular TV show.
Actress and model Beverly Johnson says she was asked to audition for a role on the family sitcom in the mid-1980s and Cosby told her to come to his house to read for the part.
While there, she claims he insisted she drink a cappuccino — and she quickly became “woozy.”
“As I felt my body go completely limp, my brain switched into automatic-survival mode. That meant making sure Cosby understood that I knew exactly what was happening at that very moment,” she wrote in an article for Vanity Fair.
“You are a motherf—er, aren’t you?” she says she told him.
Enraged, he pushed her out of the house and into a taxi.
Sometimes he didn’t bother with the drugs.
“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” actress Louisa Moritz claims Cosby assaulted her in the dressing room before an appearance on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” in 1971.
“[He] suddenly approached me and took out his penis, which was now in the line of my face and pressed up against it,” Moritz told TMZ.
“He took his hands and put them on the back of my head and forced his penis in my mouth, saying, ‘Have a taste of this. It will do you good in so many ways.’ ”
He then walked out, saying, “Now you don’t want to upset me and the plans for your future, do you?” she claimed.
But Cosby — who joked about date-rape drugs in his stand-up sets — also used pharmaceuticals in his alleged assault routine dating back decades, according to his accusers.
Cindra Ladd, the wife of “Blade Runner” producer Alan Ladd, Jr., says he gave her a pill in 1969 after the then-21-year-old complained of a headache during a night on the town in New York.
“I asked a couple of times what it was. Each time he reassured me, asking, ‘Don’t you trust me?’ Of course I did. This was Bill Cosby,” she wrote in a piece for the Huffington Post.
Things got blurry, and she woke up the next morning naked in bed with him.
“It was obvious to me that he had had sex with me. I was horrified, embarrassed and ashamed,” she wrote. “It was a different time and ‘date rape’ was a concept that didn’t exist.”
The next year, former Playboy Playmate Victoria Valentino says the comic gave her a pill when she agreed to go to dinner with him and another female friend in LA.
Valentino was mourning the death of her young son a year earlier, so he gave both women both drugs, saying, “This will make us all feel better,” she told the Washington Post.
Next thing she knew, they “couldn’t function” and Cosby was taking them to an apartment, where the comedian pushed her head down onto his erect penis.
“It was like a waking nightmare,” she told the paper.
Another Playboy Bunny, Carla Ferrigno — wife of “The Incredible Hulk” star Lou Ferrigno — claims Cosby tried to force himself on her in 1967.
After a double date, he pushed himself against her and kissed her as she tried to push him off, she told radio program “The John and Ken Show.”
“He came at me again and I just pushed and jumped and ran and I got out of his way and ran out of the hall, and this guy was coming out of one of the rooms and I said I want to go home,” Ferrigno said.
Several women have accused Cosby of assaulting them at Hugh Hefner’s notoriously sordid Playboy Mansion.
Judy Huth is suing Cosby for allegedly molesting her at the California residence when she was 15 in 1974.
She says he invited her there after they met in a park where he was filming a movie. He told her to say she was 19 and plied her with booze, then brought her to a bedroom where he stuck his hand down her pants and used her own hand to perform “a sex act on himself without her consent,” according to court papers.
Thirty-four years later, in 2008, model Chloe Goins claims Cosby also drugged and assaulted her at a Playboy Mansion party.
She says she felt “foggy” after Cosby gave her drinks and then passed out in a bedroom. When she woke up, he was licking her toes and she felt something sticky on her chest, she told the Daily Mail.
‘He jumped up, pulled his pants back up quickly and left. He had seen that I was alert and bolted out of there. I was left in the room by myself,” she told the British tabloid. “I felt embarrassed, it was a gross, icky feeling. I felt very violated and humiliated.”
Cosby’s targets weren’t all starry-eyed aspiring actresses and models — a waitress, a massage therapist, a nurse, writers and businesswomen have all pointed the finger at the former Pudding Pop hype man in recent years
Janice Baker-Kinney — who also testified at the trial — says she was 24 years old and working as a bartender at Harrah’s in Reno, Nev., in 1982 when she was met Cosby at a pizza party hosted by the casino’s owner.
The funnyman gave her two pills, which she believes were Quaaludes — and the next thing Baker-Kinney remembers, she was waking up naked in bed with him.
“There was a sticky wetness between my legs, and it felt like . . . I had had sex the night before,” she testified.
“I was so mortified that I had passed out. It’s kind of like, I was embarrassed and mortified. Here I was, laying naked. I said, ‘I’ve been dieting the past few days, and maybe that’s why I passed out.’ ”
As Baker-Kinney attempted to flee the house, she said Cosby blocked the door and raised his finger first to his mouth and then to hers.
“Now this is just between you and me,” she recalled him saying. “So don’t tell anybody any kind of thing.”
On Thursday, she said she was overwhelmed with “relief and gratitude.”
“We can now move forward with our heads held high,” she said.
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