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The Number Of Women Alleging Sexual Assault By Bill Cosby Just Reached 60

AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File
AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File

The sexual assault allegations against Bill Cosby, a once near-universally beloved public figure whose name is now often invoked as shorthand for “alleged serial rapist,” just keep on coming: On Sunday, the Washington Post reported that two more women have come forward with accusations against the star. With their allegations, the number of woman claiming abuse by Cosby rises to 60.

The accusers were both Jane Does — numbers six and eight, respectively — in the 2005 civil suit filed against Cosby by Andrea Constand, the former Temple University who is currently embroiled in the only criminal case Cosby is facing. (The rest of his dozens have accusers can no longer take criminal action, largely due to expired statutes of limitation, and instead are seeking recourse through civil action.) This is the first time either has told her story publicly.

To anyone following the dozens of allegations against Cosby, the stories of these two women will sound disturbingly familiar: Drinks, an invitation by Cosby to a private space, a blurry stretch of time in which a woman was unconscious, and waking to the awareness that something was very, very wrong. Cosby, through his multiple and ever-changing legal team, has repeatedly denied all accusations of sexual misconduct.

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Jane Doe No. 6 tells the Post about an incident in Cosby’s hotel room in the mid-1980s, where they met after Cosby performed at Clemson University. She drank a Kahlua and coffee, she says, and then Cosby asked her, “Do you like back rubs or belly rubs?” She rubbed his belly; she passed out.

Jane Doe No. 8 was a booker for a modeling agency when she met Cosby, in 1984. She went to dinner with Cosby and a model from her agency and, later that night, called her friend Tony Hogue, a male model, and begged him to come get her. Hogue told the Post that she felt “very uncomfortable,” saying her “clothes were messed up” and that Cosby had touched and kissed her. When Hogue asked if she wanted Cosby’s driver to take her home, Hogue remembered, Jane Doe told him “she couldn’t even really move.”

When Hogue arrived at Cosby’s house, “he banged on Cosby’s door for a long time.” And when he did come to the door, Cosby behaved as though nothing was awry. Hogue’s friend left with Hogue, as did model Beth Ferrier — or, as she would become known in Constand’s civil suit, Jane Doe No. 5.

The two accusers join a phalanx of women whose allegations against Cosby span nearly half a century.

The earliest accusations date back to the 1960s. Sunni Welles said she met Cosby in the 1960s when she was 17 years old; he spiked her Coca-Cola after taking her to a jazz club and, when she woke up, she says she knew she’d been assaulted. Carla Ferrigno says Cosby grabbed and kissed her at a party in 1967 when she was a teenager. Joan Tarshis has accused Cosby of drugging and assaulting her twice, in 1969, when she was 19 years old and had traveled to Los Angeles to work as a comedy writer.

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Film executive Cindra Lodd says in 1969, after Cosby gave her a pill for a headache, her night with Cosby went fuzzy; she woke up naked in a bed in Cosby’s friend’s apartment, she claims, to find Cosby wearing a terrycloth bathrobe and acting as if nothing was wrong. “It was obvious to me that he had sex with me,” she wrote in a Huffington Post essay last January, and she was so “horrified, embarrassed and ashamed,” she didn’t discuss the night in question with anyone but her roommate for 36 years.

Similar assault allegations litter the years that follow, through 2008, which is when model Chloe Goins claims Cosby drugged and assaulted her at the Playboy Mansion. Goins was either 17 or 18 years old (she does not remember the exact date of the party, and she turned 18 that year) when, she says, she regained consciousness in a bedroom at the Mansion feeling “a sharp pain in one of her toes.” As she came to, she looked down to see Cosby had his mouth wrapped around one of her toes. Goins sued Cosby in federal court and dropped her case in February; in May, she sued in Los Angeles Superior Court and, in the new complaint, is suing both Cosby and Playboy founder Hugh Hefner for sexual battery, gender violence, and other charges.

Multiple civil cases against Cosby are ongoing. Constand’s criminal action is moving forward as well, despite multiple efforts on Cosby’s part to have her case thrown out. If convicted, Cosby could be sentenced to 10 years in prison.