New York Magazine striking cover on the women who accuse Bill Cosby of assault. Photo / New York Magazine
New York Magazine striking cover on the women who accuse Bill Cosby of assault. Photo / New York Magazine
Thirty-five women who allege they were sexually assaulted by US comedy legend Bill Cosby have been united on a magazine cover to tell startlingly similar stories of abuse.
They include models, waitresses, Playboy bunnies and women who used to work in show business. One says he raped her while she was grief stricken over the recent death of her six-year-old son.
The New York magazine cover story is the largest expose yet of alleged abuse from nearly 50 women who have publicly accused Cosby of assault from the 1960s to 1996 across the United States.
Last week The New York Times ran a report in which Cosby's own words - not those of his alleged victims - seem to lend even more credence to the portrait painted by dozens of women who steadfastly maintain that beneath the comedian's charming exterior lies a devious sexual predator.
Now New York magazine has followed suit and dropped a bombshell of its own on Cosby. It collected the accounts of 35 of his accusers - and their words are painful as they are damning.
The magazine's cover is striking; all 35 women seated in a row, with an empty chair for victims that have yet to come forward. The headline is "Cosby: The Women - An Unwelcome Sisterhood".
Each of the 35 women was interviewed separately but their accounts are eerily similar.
Patricia Leary Steuer, 59:Cosby handed Steuer a drink and insisted she perform an improv exercise, pretending she was a queen with oatmeal covering her face. She began to feel woozy. Her next memory is of Cosby standing above her - her clothes off - in a bathrobe. He handed her a toothbrush, telling her she had gotten sick and passed out in his guestroom. Steuer went home, still unsure of what actually happened to her.
Marcella Tate, 67:Cosby invited her inside for a glass of wine. Tate agreed, and, once inside, Cosby handed her a drink. The next thing Tate remembers is waking up next to a naked Cosby in bed. She doesn't remember how she got home. She came forward in April 2015. "I understood at the time that it was wrong, and I didn't really know what. I pushed it down and it resided in a very private place. It affects your trust with other people. You push it down and you don't deal with it."
More than 40 women have publicly accused Cosby of rape or sexual assault but the magazine said "many of the women [interviewed] say they know of others still out there who've chosen to remain silent".
Cosby denies the accusations against him. Photo / AP
Cosby, 78, has never been charged with a crime, and he and his representatives have steadfastly denied the assault claims by an increasingly long list of women. Though he has continued to perform stand-up comedy in recent months, dozens of assault allegations have permanently altered his public image.
Cosby, a pioneering African-American comedian who played a beloved family doctor on the hit 1980s sitcom The Cosby Show, has become a pariah in the wake of the snowballing scandal.
Despite being interviewed separately, many of their stories are startlingly similar: that the famed comedian drugged them, then assaulted or raped them while they were barely conscious.
"Each story is awful in its own right. But the horror is multiplied by the sheer volume of seeing them together," the magazine wrote.
New York photographed and interviewed each woman separately in a project that was six months in the making before the stories were uploaded on the web edition.
The magazine's website crashed on Monday, reportedly due to a hacker - not upset with Cosby's accusers but allegedly out to avenge a unpleasant visit to New York, America's biggest city.
In all 46 women have publicly accused the 78-year-old of rape or sexual assault. Many of the 35 in this week's magazine story say they know of others still out there who have chosen to remain silent.
Victoria Valentino, a 72-year-old former Playboy bunny, was allegedly assaulted in 1969 when Cosby took her and a friend to a steak restaurant not long after her young son had died.
She told the magazine that Cosby gave her and her friend pills that would make her "feel better" but instead left her fighting nausea and her friend "completely unconscious".
Valentino remembers Cosby sitting next to her friend on a love seat "with this very predatory look on his face".
After several sex acts, she said: "How do we get out of here, how do we get home?
"And he said, 'Call a cab'."
Joyce Emmons, 70, who managed a comedy club, said she was assaulted in around 1979 after a night out with the star and friends, during which she had asked Cosby for a headache pill.
Instead of a Tylenol, Cosby said he had something stronger.
"All I remember is taking the pill," she told the magazine. When she woke up, she "had no clothes on, and there was Bill's friend totally naked in bed with me".
She said Cosby told her he had given her a Quaalude.
Emmons said she had been devastated by the behavior of someone she had considered a close friend.
"I was hurt with Bill more than angry at his friend. Bill let him take advantage of me. That kills me. That's why I know the stories of what he did to the other women are true."
In a lurid 2005 court deposition, Cosby admitted obtaining Quaaludes to have sex with at least one woman, obtaining seven prescriptions for the sedative and giving them to other people.
Last week, Cosby's lawyer Monique Pressley defended the actor, who has remained almost entirely tight-lipped about the allegations, even as his reputation has been shredded.
"The sheer volume, or number of people who are saying a particular thing does not make it true," she told ABC television.
