Beverly Johnson claims Bill Cosby drugged her when she auditioned for 'Cosby Show'

Beverly Johnson has joined the list of over a dozen women who claim that they were drugged by comedian Bill Cosby. The former model alleges that she was drugged while auditioning for The Cosby Show in the 1980s.

Johnson came forward in a lengthy Vanity Fair piece. She sets the scene by noting that she was struggling at the time to find work in Hollywood and was fighting her ex-husband over custody of her only child. Then, suddenly, Cosby’s team invited her to a Cosby Show taping and offered her the chance to appear on the show. Since it was among the most popular TV shows at the time, she couldn’t possibly say no.

After the taping, Cosby invited her and her daughter to his New York brownstone, where they had brunch. Then, he asked her to come over again to read for the part. She accepted and had dinner there.

After dinner, they went up to his bar, where he served her a cappuccino from an elaborate espresso machine. He asked her to read the part while pretending to be drunk.

“I told him I didn’t drink coffee that late in the afternoon because it made getting to sleep at night more difficult,” she wrote. “He wouldn’t let it go. He insisted that his espresso machine was the best model on the market and promised I’d never tasted a cappuccino quite like this one. It’s nuts, I know, but it felt oddly inappropriate arguing with Bill Cosby so I took a few sips of the coffee just to appease him.”

Later, she knew “by the second sip of the drink Cosby had given me that I’d been drugged—and drugged good.”

She wrote that her head “became woozy, my speech became slurred, and the room began to spin nonstop.” Then, Cosby put his hands on her waist.

“As I felt my body go completely limp, my brain switched into automatic-survival mode. That meant making sure Cosby understood that I knew exactly what was happening at that very moment,” she notes. She then yelled at him, “You are a motherf***er aren’t you?”

This stunned Cosby at first, but then he violently pulled her down a staircase, lead her outside his home and called a taxi.

“I recall his seething anger at my tirade and then him grabbing me by my left arm hard and yanking all 110 pounds of me down a bunch of stairs as my high heels clicked and clacked on every step,” she wrote. “I feared my neck was going to break with the force he was using to pull me down those stairs.”

Johnson claims that it took “a few days” for the drug to wear off. She actually called a private number Cosby gave her at that point, when she returned to California. His wife answered the phone and she said she would call the next day. She didn’t and decided not to fight Cosby publicly because he was such a powerful figure.

“When I sat down to write my memoir in 2013, I pondered if I should include my Cosby experience. I didn't want to get involved in a he-said/she-said situation,” Johnson wrote. “Now that other women have come forward with their nightmare stories, I join them.”

Cosby’s attorneys have denied claims in the past few weeks, but did not specifically comment on Johnson’s claims. Janice Dickinson, also a former supermodel, claimed that she was sexually assaulted by Cosby in the 1980s as well.

image courtesy of Kristin Callahan/INFphoto.com

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