Dickinson, now 59, recalls first meeting Cosby, now 77, when her agent set up a meeting with him to hire her for a role on The Cosby Show.
After they had dinner, she says their next conversation was when he
called her out of the blue while she was in rehab for drugs and alcohol.
Following her stay in rehab, Dickinson says Cosby reached out to her
during a trip to Bali and had her travel to Lake Tahoe, because he was
performing there and wanted to offer her the job they had discussed as
well as help her with a singing career.
Dickinson
says they had dinner in Lake Tahoe, and claims that he gave her a glass
of red wine and a pill, which she asked for because she was
menstruating and had stomach pains.
And that's when she tells ET that things took a disturbing turn.
"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 tells 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."
Dickinson also says she tried to write about the assault in her 2002 autobiography No Lifeguard on Duty: The Accidental Life of the World's First Supermodel,
but claims that when she submitted a draft with her full story to
HarperCollins, Cosby and his lawyers pressured her and the publisher to
remove the details.
"I'm
doing this because it's the right thing to do, and it happened to me,
and this is the true story," she says about coming out with her story
now. "I believe all the other women."
Dickinson says that keeping the alleged sexual assault a secret for 32 years drove her to a life of hurting herself.
"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 says. "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."
But
now Dickinson, who says she never confronted Cosby after the alleged
incident, doesn't mince words when it comes to what she would say to him
now.
"How dare you," she says. "Go f*ck yourself. How dare you take advantage of me. And I hope you rot."
Dickinson
is the third woman to come forward with a sexual assault accusation
against Cosby, after a renewed interest in the allegations began when
comedian Hannibal Buress called Cosby a "rapist" during an October
comedy show in Philadelphia.
On Monday, ET spoke to former publicist
Joan Tarshis who says that the legendary comedian assaulted her on two
occasions in 1969. She also echoed Dickinson's statements about why she
stayed silent for so long.
"I
want to talk about this now and I want to really support the other
women who have gone through this," she told ET. "Now with people coming
out..., it's being handled differently."
Tarshis is referring to another of Cosby's accusers, Barbara Bowman, who wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post
earlier this month detailing the alleged assault she says she fell
victim to in 1985 when she was a 17-year-old aspiring actress.
"In
one case, I blacked out after having dinner and one glass of wine at
his New York City brownstone, where he had offered to mentor me and
discuss the entertainment industry," she wrote. "When I came to, I was
in my panties and a man's t-shirt, and Cosby was looming over me. I’m
certain now that he drugged and raped me. But as a teenager, I tried to
convince myself I had imagined it."
Bowman
said that she was one of the alleged victims asked to testify when a
woman named Andrea Constand filed a suit against Cosby in 2004. The case
was eventually settled out of court.
Cosby's
lawyer, John P. Schmitt, issued a statement on Sunday in response to
the sexual assault allegations after Cosby's initial response of just
silence during an NPR interview Saturday.
"Over
the last several weeks, decade-old, discredited allegations against Mr.
Cosby have resurfaced. The fact they are being repeated does not make
them true," the statement reads. "Mr. Cosby does not intend to dignify
these allegations with any comment. He would like to thank all his fans
for the outpouring of support and assure them that, at age 77, he is
doing his best work. There will be no further statement from Mr. Cosby
or any of his representatives."
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