Supermodel Janice Dickinson: 'Bill Cosby Raped me'

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Add supermodel Janice Dickenson to the growing list of women with allegations that Bill Cosby is a rapist.

In an exclusive interview Tuesday with Entertainment Tonight, the former America’s Next Top Model judge claimed Cosby sexually assaulted her in 1982.

Dickinson, now 59, said her first encounter with the comedian took place when her agent set up a meeting with him to potentially hire her for a role on The Cosby Show. After they had dinner, she claims their next conversation was when he called her out of the blue while she was in rehab for drugs and alcohol. Dickinson says upon being released from her stint in rehab, Cosby reached out to her while she was on a trip to Bali and had her travel to Lake Tahoe, because he was performing there and wanted to talk to her about her acting and singing career.

Dickinson claims she and Cosby had dinner in Lake Tahoe, and then he gave her a glass of red wine and a pill, which she asked for because she was on her period and had stomach pains.

“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,” Dickinson said. “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.”

The former star of The Surreal Life says she is opening up today because she believes all the other women who have come forth with similar allegations.

“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 painful revelation. “I believe all the other women.”

Dickinson says that keeping the sexual assault silent for 32 years was devastatingly painful.

“Stuffing feelings of rape and my unresolved issues with this incident has driven me into a life of trying to hurt myself because I didn’t have counsel and I was afraid,” she said. “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.”

Dickinson released her memoir (No Lifeguard on Duty: The Accidental Life of the World’s First Supermodel) in 2002, and says she attempted to write about the assault but was blocked by her publisher HarperCollins and Cosby’s lawyers.

Dickinson is now the 15th woman to accuse the 77-year-old comedian of sexual assault. This just weeks after comedian Hannibal Buress referenced Cosby’s decades-old sexual assault allegations in a comedy routine.

Cosby has yet to personally respond to any of these allegations, but on Sunday, his lawyer, John P. Schmitt released a statement, saying, “over the last several weeks, decade-old, discredited allegations against Mr. Cosby have resurfaced. The fact that they are being repeated does not make them true.”

Follow theGrio.com’s Entertainment Editor Chris Witherspoon on Twitter @WitherspoonC.