Nine new plaintiffs have accused Bill Cosby of sexual abuse, joining more than 60 women in lawsuit filed in Nevada on Wednesday. From a pin off of The A.V. Club’s map, the new women are Janice Dickinson (Barbee Rehab, The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency), Heidi Thomas, Rebecca Cooper, Janice Baker Kinney, Linda Kirkpatrick, Pam Joy Abeyta, Lise Lotte-Lublin, Angela Leslie, and Lili Bernard (Just One Small Thing, Coming Down). Each woman alleged that Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted them.
Individual allegations span from 1979 to 1992. In the filing of the complaint, the women alleged 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 arrived a few weeks after Joe Lombardo, governor of Nevada, signed a “lookback law” that abolished the two-year time limit for adults to file sexual assault suits. Several of the allegations made about Cosby are outside of that time frame, happening decades ago. In Pennsylvania of 2018, Cosby was convicted on three charges of aggravated indecent assault after Andrea Constand, on staff at Temple University, alleged that he assaulted and drugged her in 2004.
Cosby (The Cosby Show, Fat Albert) was released in July 2021, serving little more than two years out of the ten-year sentence when his conviction was overturned. Cosby’s publicist Andrew Wyatt claimed in a statement on Instagram that the new lawsuit is crafted of “false narratives.”
“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,” wrote Wyatt. He called 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.”
Model Janice Dickinson contributed as a witness, even taking the stand at Cosby’s Pennsylvania hearing. Lotte-Lublin has advocated for survivors as well as backed 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 explained to 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.”