‘Here Was America’s Dad on Top of Me’

NORRISTOWN, Pa. — The former model Janice Dickinson told a jury Thursday that she could still remember Bill Cosby’s smell from an encounter with him in a Lake Tahoe hotel room in 1982. She had gone there to meet him, she said, but was feeling woozy from a pill he gave her for menstrual cramps.

“His robe opened,” she testified during the fourth day of Cosby’s retrial on sexual assault charges. “He smelled like cigar and espresso and his body odor.”

Dickinson, 27 at the time, said the pill paralyzed her, and Cosby, then 45, seized the opportunity to sexually assault her.

“Here was America’s Dad on top of me,” she said, “a happily married man with five children, on top of me.”

Cosby, now 80, is not charged with raping Dickinson. But her account is one of five the prosecution presented from women who say they believe he drugged and sexually assaulted them. The jury is considering whether Cosby is guilty of assaulting a sixth woman, Andrea Constand.

Constand, a former Temple University employee, says Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted her at his home near here in 2004. Prosecutors introduced the other accounts saying they demonstrate Cosby’s signature pattern of predatory behavior.

But Cosby has denied any inappropriate behavior and said the sex with Constand was consensual. His first trial, in summer 2017, ended with a hung jury.

His defense team made a sustained effort to shake Dickinson’s credibility, pushing her to acknowledge that a memoir she published in 2002 made no mention of an assault. Reading from the book, Thomas A. Mesereau Jr., a defense lawyer, said that Dickinson wrote she never entered Cosby’s room and ended up taking two quaaludes in her own room, alone.

“You told a tale to the jury today that is completely different from the book,” he said. “You made things up to get a paycheck.”

But Dickinson said she had been advised by her publishers to leave out the assault for legal reasons.

“You take poetic license in what you do,” she said. “Today I am on a sworn Bible.”

Four other women have told the jury of being drugged and assaulted by Cosby.

Dickinson, now 63, a reality TV celebrity, said she was working as a model in New York in 1982 when Cosby approached her through her agency and invited her to his Manhattan house to talk about acting.

Soon afterward, she said Cosby flew her to Lake Tahoe where she watched him perform, and they had dinner and discussed her career. She said she went to his hotel room to continue their conversation, and there she snapped some pictures — which were shown to the courtroom — of Cosby in a colored bathrobe and cap talking on the telephone.

Dickinson said that because she was knocked out by the drugs, she does not fully remember the sexual assault. But when she woke up, she said, she found herself back in her own room, alone. “I noticed semen between my legs and I felt anal pain,” she said. “I felt very, very sore.”

The publisher of Dickinson’s memoir, Judith Regan, has confirmed there were discussions about putting the rape accusation in the book. The defense has suggested that Cosby’s accusers are motivated by media attention and even money. On Thursday, the team carried the argument to the steps of the courthouse, where Cosby’s publicist, Andrew Wyatt, accused Gloria Allred, the civil rights attorney who is representing three of the five accusers, of being “part of the con.” Allred’s daughter, Lisa Bloom, represents Dickinson.

At one point, Wyatt asked Allred to explain her proposal to have Cosby set up a fund to compensate the women who have accused him of abuse.

“I’m so glad you asked that,” she shot back, “but you need to listen, and don’t interrupt.”

“I’m not your child,” Wyatt responded, and walked off.

Dickinson is one of about a dozen women who have outstanding civil suits against the entertainer, most of which are on hold pending the outcome of this criminal trial. Dickinson, like most of the other women, is suing him for defamation because she says his representatives characterized her as a liar when she came forward.

In the criminal case, Cosby’s lawyers have tried to show the jury that there were holes in each of the women’s accounts. Mesereau confronted one accuser, Janice Baker-Kinney, on Thursday about what he described as discrepancies between the accounts she had given her sister and later the police and news media.

Baker-Kinney had told the jury on Wednesday that she was drugged and sexually assaulted by Cosby at a house party in Reno in 1982 after he’d given her two pills. She was 24 at the time and working as a bartender.

“Is it true that you told your sister,” Mesereau asked, “you went there and drank too much and didn’t mention the pill?”

Baker-Kinney said she could not recall what she had told her sister.

But Mary Chokron, a friend, testified that she had received a call soon after the encounter and Baker-Kinney said she had been knocked unconscious by some kind of party drug. “She blamed herself for taking the pill,” Chokron said.

Baker-Finney, a sports broadcast stage manager who now lives near San Francisco, said she did not speak out at the time because she feared she would be blamed for having put herself in that position and would be fired.

“That was the culture then,” she said, “and was for a very long time.” Lise-Lotte Lublin, a teacher, told of an encounter with Cosby in a Las Vegas hotel room in 1989, when she was 23. She said she was there for an acting lesson, that he gave her two drinks and asked her to sit between his legs, and began to stroke her hair. She said she remembered little else. “When I woke up, I was at home,” she said, but she assumes she was sexually assaulted.

“You have no recollection of sexual assault?” Kathleen Bliss, a defense lawyer, asked several times.

“I would not have the memory because I was drugged,” Lublin replied.