Updates to our Terms of Use

We are updating our Terms of Use. Please carefully review the updated Terms before proceeding to our website.

Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service

Janice Dickinson Takes on Cosby at Assault Retrial 

Television personality Janice Dickinson helped Pennsylvania prosecutors on Thursday build their case that Bill Cosby’s assault of Andrea Constand fits the comedian’s decades-long history as a sexual predator.

NORRISTOWN, Pa. (CN) - Television personality Janice Dickinson helped Pennsylvania prosecutors on Thursday build their case that Bill Cosby’s assault of Andrea Constand fits the comedian’s decades-long history as a sexual predator.

"I didn't consent to this,” Dickinson testified. “Here was 'America's Dad,' on top of me. A married man, father of five kids, on top of me. I was thinking how wrong it was. How very wrong it was."

Dickinson, who co-starred for years with Tyra Banks on the television show “America’s Next Top Model,” says Cosby assaulted her in 1982 but she did not make these allegations public until a 2014 appearance on “Entertainment Tonight.”

Public pressure had been mounting at that time as dozens of women came forward with similar stories against the aging comedian. Of all of Cosby’s accusers, Constand remains the only one whose claims are not too old to prosecute. The former director of operations for the basketball team at Temple University claims that she looked up to Cosby as a mentor, only to find herself incapacitated one night at the comedian’s home in suburban Philadelphia after taking blue pills he offered.

Dickinson, one of five women tapped by prosecutors to recount similar encounters with Cosby, took the stand Thursday on Day 4 of the 80-year-old comedian’s retrial.

The former model says she was 27 when Cosby invited her to Lake Tahoe to talk about how she could expand her career into singing and acting.

During dinner with Cosby and his musical director at Cosby's hotel on the California side of the lake, Dickinson said she complained of menstrual cramps and that Cosby produced a little blue pill for her to take.

Soon Cosby's musical director left, and Dickinson felt woozy and "slightly out of it,” she testified.

Cosby then allegedly told her: "We'll continue this conversation upstairs.”

Dickinson said the pill had her “rendered motionless” in Cosby’s hotel, where he pounced.

“His robe opened up,” Dickinson said, adding, “I couldn't move.”

The next morning, Dickinson allegedly awoke with vaginal pain and noticed semen between her legs. She said she confronted him about what had happened, but that he looked at her "like I was crazy.”

“I wanted to hit him,” Dickinson testified. “I wanted to punch him in the face.”

Dickinson also described the event to the jury as “gross.” She said Cosby smelled of cigars and espresso.

“I didn’t fly to Tahoe to have sex with Mr. Cosby," Dickinson said.

Led by celebrity attorney Tom Mesereau, the defense team seized on how Dickinson’s testimony differs from what she wrote about Cosby in her 2002 autobiography.

Explaining that the assault was glossed over because of pressure Cosby and his lawyers exerted on her publisher, Dickinson testified on cross-examination that she "wasn't under oath" when she wrote the book like she is now.

"It's all a fabrication there,” she said of the book. “It was written by ghostwriters. I wanted a paycheck.”

Dickinson got on the witness stand after prosecutors wrapped up with another Cosby accuser who says Cosby assaulted her on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe in 1982 as well.

"I was raped,” Janice Baker-Kinney testified, saying Cosby had sex with her after giving her pills she suspected to be quaaludes.

Baker-Kinney began her testimony late Wednesday, saying she has long blamed herself for taking the pills that Cosby gave her.

“It pisses me off that that’s something I’m carrying forever,” she said. “I don’t want to have that guilt and shame. I don’t want to think that something that happened to me is my fault. I push it away. I don’t think about it. But it’s going to be with me forever.”

On cross-examination Thursday, defense attorney Mesereau questioned why Baker-Kinney waited to come forward until 2015, after lawyer Gloria Allred proposed that Cosby use his vast resources to compensate accusers.

Two other Cosby accusers gave stories similar to Dickinson and Baker-Kinney’s on Wednesday. Lise-Lotte Lublin rounded out this slate of witnesses for the state on Thursday.

Another former model and aspiring actress, Lublin says she was 23 in 1989 when Cosby prodded her to drink two shots of alcohol in his Las Vegas hotel suite.

Following along because he was "America's Dad,” Lublin said she lost consciousness after Cosby told her to sit between his knees and started petting her head.

Lublin doesn't remember anything else about that night in 1989.

Cosby’s defense to the charges involving Constand is that he had a consensual romantic relationship with the woman, despite the fact that she is gay and 35 years his junior.

In contrast to the comedian’s first trial, which ended in a hung jury, Cosby’s defense team has also sought to portray Constand as a money-hungry “con artist.”

When Montgomery County prosecutors declined to prosecute Cosby over Constand’s allegations in 2005, she accepted $3.4 million to settle a civil suit.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Categories / Criminal, Entertainment, Trials

Subscribe to Closing Arguments

Sign up for new weekly newsletter Closing Arguments to get the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and hot cases and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world.

Loading...