Bill Cosby sued by nine more women for sexual assault
The new plaintiffs join the more than 60 women that have accused Bill Cosby of sexually abusing them
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Nine more women have accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault in a lawsuit filed in US district court for Nevada on Wednesday, NBC News reports. The accusers join a group of more than 60 women who have accused Cosby of sexual abuse.
The new plaintiffs—identified as Janice Dickinson, Lise Lotte-Lublin, Janice Baker Kinney, Lili Bernard, Heidi Thomas, Linda Kirkpatrick, Rebecca Cooper, Pam Joy Abeyta, and Angela Leslie—each allege that Cosby drugged and assaulted them, with individual allegations spanning from 1979 and 1992. In the complaint in the filing, the group alleges that Cosby “used his enormous power, fame and prestige, and claimed interest in helping them and/or their careers, as a pretense to isolate and sexually assault them.”
The lawsuit arrives just a few weeks after Nevada governor Joe Lombardo signed a “lookback law” that eliminated a two-year deadline for adults to file sexual abuse cases. Many of the dozens of allegations against Cosby stem from incidents that occurred decades ago. In 2018, Cosby was convicted in Pennsylvania on three counts of aggravated indecent assault after Temple University staffer Andrea Constand alleged he drugged and assaulted her in 2004. Cosby served just over two years of a ten-year prison sentence before his conviction was overturned, and he was subsequently released, in July 2021.
In a statement shared to Instagram, Cosby’s publicist Andrew Wyatt dismissed what he called the “false narratives” the new lawsuit espouses.
“These distractors will continue to forge false narratives against Mr. Cosby because the media, judges and lawmakers continue to allow these distractors to come center stage with a script that has never been vetted,” Wyatt wrote in his caption, calling the plaintiffs “confused people who have misremembered events that occurred 40, 50 or 60 years ago,” and “not virtuous victims, but vicious perpetrators of a criminal hoax to destroy Mr. Cosby.”
“Virtuous victims” or not, some of the new plaintiffs have been vocal about sexual assault before. Model Janice Dickinson served as a witness in Cosby’s Pennsylvania trial, where she took the stand, and Lise Lotte-Lublin has been a longtime advocate for survivors (and supported Lombardo’s “lookback law”).
“For years I have fought for survivors of sexual assault and today is the first time I will be able to fight for myself,” Lotte-Lublin told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “With the new law change, I now have the ability to take my assailant Bill Cosby to court. My journey has just begun, but I am grateful for this opportunity to find justice.”