Dickinson told jurors she was “rendered motionless” by the pill she was given as Cosby got on top of her in his Lake Tahoe, California, hotel room.
NORRISTOWN, Pa. — Model
Janice Dickinson told a jury Thursday that
Bill Cosby raped her in 1982 after giving her a pill he claimed would ease her menstrual cramps but instead left her immobilized.
Dickinson, the fourth accuser to take the witness stand at Cosby’s sex assault retrial, told jurors she was “rendered motionless” by the pill as Cosby got on top of her in his Lake Tahoe, California, hotel room.
“Here’s a married man, father of five kids, on top of me,” Dickinson testified. “I was thinking how wrong it was. How very wrong it was.”
Dickinson, 27 at the time, testified she felt vaginal pain and, after waking up the next morning, noticed semen between her legs. She said Cosby looked at her “like I was crazy” when she confronted him about what had happened.
“I wanted to hit him. I wanted to punch him in the face,” she said.
Dickinson, the former model and TV personality who has called herself the “world’s first supermodel,” became one of the first women to go public with her allegations against Cosby when she told her story on “Entertainment Tonight” in 2014.
She said she wrote about the assault in her 2002 autobiography, but Cosby and his lawyers pressured her and the publisher to remove details.
During cross examination, a defence attorney seized on inconsistencies in Dickinson’s testimony and what she wrote in the book. Dickinson said she went along with what was written in the book because she needed the money.
She is one of five additional accusers whom prosecutors are calling to the stand to show Cosby had a history of drugging and molesting women.
The 80-year-old comedian is charged with sexually assaulting a woman at his home in 2004. He says it was consensual. His first trial ended in a hung jury.
The defence has dismissed the other women’s testimony as “prosecution by distraction.”
“These women proved that they were here to back up their sister — they got their sister’s back,” Cosby spokesperson Andrew Wyatt said outside court Thursday.
On the stand, Dickinson said she got to know Cosby after he called her agent and said he wanted to meet and possibly mentor her as she looked to expand her career into singing and acting. The first accuser to testify, Heidi Thomas, said she met Cosby the same way.
She said Cosby invited her to Lake Tahoe after an initial meeting at his New York City townhouse, where he had given her an acting manual. Cosby tracked her down to Bali, where she was modelling for an oil company calendar, and asked her to Lake Tahoe “to further talk about my career.”
“So, I was on the beach and I was thinking, ‘Why is this guy calling me?’” Dickinson said.
Cosby said he would foot the bill for her transportation, Dickinson testified, but first wanted to do it cheaply — drawing a laugh from the courtroom crowd.
“He said, ‘Will you fly economy?’ And I said, ‘No, I will fly first class.’ He tried to get me to fly economy.”
Dickinson said Cosby had clothes from the hotel boutique laid out in her room because the T-shirts, shorts and swimwear she had in Bali wouldn’t cut it in snowy Tahoe.
Once at the hotel, she said she tested out her vocal range with Cosby’s musical director, watched Cosby perform and then joined the two men for dinner at the hotel.
She said that’s where she started to get cramps, and that’s when Cosby produced the pill.
“I mentioned it to the gentlemen at the table and Cosby said, ‘I have something for that.’ And I was given a blue pill,” Dickinson said. “It was a little round pill.”
Then, she said, “I started to feel woozy and dizzy. Slightly out of it.”
Cosby’s musical director left, Dickinson said, and Cosby told her: “We’ll continue this conversation upstairs.”
Dickinson had a Polaroid camera with her, she said, and snapped photos of Cosby in the room wearing a colourful robe and talking on the telephone. Soon after, she said, Cosby pounced on her.
“Shortly after I took the pictures and he finished the conversation, he got on top of me,” Dickinson said. “His robe opened up, and he smelled like cigars and espresso and his body odour. I couldn’t move.
“I didn’t fly to Tahoe to have sex with Mr. Cosby,” she said.
Defence lawyers were expected to cross-examine Dickinson later Thursday.
Before her testimony, they sought to raise doubts about the allegations of another accuser who testified the comedian knocked her out with pills and raped her during a 1982 encounter in Nevada — the year of the alleged assault on Dickinson.
Janice Baker-Kinney returned to the witness stand Thursday after punctuating the first two hours of her testimony with a firm declaration: “I was raped.” She was a 24-year-old casino bartender in Reno when she says Cosby gave her pills she suspected to be quaaludes and had sex with her.
During cross-examination, Cosby lawyer Tom Mesereau suggested that Baker-Kinney was motivated to distort the facts of a fun evening when she heard about a possible $100 million (U.S.) windfall from Cosby. She came forward in April 2015, a few months after lawyer Gloria Allred proposed that Cosby set aside a chunk of his fortune to compensate accusers. Cosby never agreed to that.
Baker-Kinney told the jury she was motivated by a desire to help other accusers, and that she’s only relied on Allred as a media adviser and point of contact “to make sure I didn’t get tripped up.” She said she’s never paid Allred, hasn’t been paid by the lawyer and hasn’t been involved litigation against Cosby.
Now well into middle age, Dickinson, Baker-Kinney and the other two accusers who have testified so far told jurors they wound up unconscious from the pills or alcohol Cosby gave them, unable to say no or resist as he had his way with them.
Prosecutors have been seeking to prove that the man once revered as “America’s Dad” was one of Hollywood’s biggest predators long before he met Andrea Constand, the chief accuser in his retrial. The former women’s basketball administrator at Cosby’s alma mater, Temple University, alleges he gave her pills and molested her.
The Associated Press does not typically identify people who say they are victims of sexual assault unless they grant permission, which Constand and the other women have done.