Janice Dickinson has renewed her allegations against Bill Cosby, raising new details of the 1982 night when she claimed the comedian drugged and raped her. She also called on Barack Obama to use the increasing pressure on Cosby as a spur for sexual assault reform.
In an exclusive interview with the Guardian Weekend magazine, the former model and reality television star airs her “horrible regret – that I didn’t have the wherewithal to fight” after she says Cosby slipped her a pill.
Dickinson says she did not go public at the time for fear that she would not be believed and her reputation would be damaged. Cosby’s reputation, however, has unravelled since she and more than 40 women came forward to accuse him of assault.
It remains highly unlikely that Cosby will face criminal prosecution, because for most accusers the time in which cases must be prosecuted has already passed. Now, Dickinson has called on Obama to change those laws, known as statutes of limitation, describing the resignation many victims feel when reporting sexual assault because of “thousands and thousands of unprocessed rape kits just sitting there”.
“If a woman gets raped, it’s a crime,” Dickinson told the Guardian’s Emma Brockes. “We as women should band together and make Obama change the law. A man should go to jail for the crimes he’s committed.”
Asked about Cosby at the White House earlier this month, Obama said: “If you give a woman – or a man, for that matter, without his or her knowledge – a drug, and then have sex with that person without consent, that’s rape.”
In November, Dickinson went public with her rape accusation: that Cosby courted her with potential career opportunities as a singer or actress as his most famous project, The Cosby Show, was in development. The two met up in Lake Tahoe, on the California-Nevada border. While there, Dickinson said, she complained of menstrual cramps at dinner and was given a pill and glass of red wine by Cosby.
The last thing Dickinson claims to remember before she passed out is Cosby on top of her.
“It’s something I will never forget: the smell of his breath – coffee. He didn’t drink. Cigar breath. I remember what he was wearing: a patchwork robe. A large gold Rolex. A wedding ring that said BC. He had on a brown velvet hat, like a pimp hat,” Dickinson told the Guardian.
When she woke up, “I was alone.”
Cosby’s lawyer has denied Dickinson’s claims on behalf of the comedian, claiming that “documentary proof and Ms Dickinson’s own words show that her new story about something she now claims happened back in 1982 is a fabricated lie”.
The lawyer asserts that this account contradicts the account in Dickinson’s book, in which she claims that Cosby simply dismissed her after she refused to have sex with him.
Dickinson and two others have taken to civil courts to fight claims by Cosby that the women are lying, filing a defamation suit. Whatever the outcome of that case, public opinion has largely spoken: Cosby has lost network deals, television specials, commendations and charitable positions since a wave of accusers came forward last fall.
In her interview with the Guardian on 22 July, Dickinson said that despite the loss of commercial deals, regarding her own alleged assault, “he can’t get arrested”.
Dickinson appeared to have found some consolation in the renewed public scrutiny: “You hit him where he breathes: his pocketbook.”
Renewed scrutiny of the allegations against Cosby has rippled through the public again with the publication of a lauded New York magazine cover story. The magazine photographed and interviewed 35 of the 46 women known to have accused Cosby of sexual assault.
In two 10-year-old depositions that surfaced earlier this month, Cosby admitted to obtaining the sedative quaaludes for consensual sex and described how fame helped him seduce women.
Cosby has fought back through his legal team, who said he was “nothing more than being one of the many people who introduced quaaludes into their consensual sex life in the 1970s”. His attorneys have also worked to discredit Dickinson, whose memoir offers a different account of the alleged rape. Dickinson says her publisher made her change it.
In the wide-ranging interview in Guardian Weekend, Dickinson also discussed physical abuse at the hands of her father and a date with Roman Polanski.
“[H]e didn’t say three sentences to me,” Dickinson recalls of the date with the director, “until I got into the car and he said: ‘Are we having sex tonight?’ I said: ‘No, I want to be dropped off at my house right now.’ Which they did. Roman Polanski: he should be in jail.”
Dickinson expressed a kind of resignation, if not ongoing pain, over her encounter with Cosby.
“I didn’t know what a rape kit was, and even if I did, I just recently read that there are thousands and thousands of unprocessed rape kits just sitting there. These monsters are still allowed to vote, still allowed to go out and do it again, and that’s what makes me mad. I have a daughter, she’s 21, she’s a senior in college. She’s proud of me. All of her friends are proud,” she said of her family’s reaction to the publicity surrounding her case.
