It started with Kahlua and coffee, the woman said.
Then, she said, Bill Cosby asked her a question: “Do you like back rubs or belly rubs?”
The setting was Cosby’s hotel room one night in the mid-1980s after the comedian had appeared at Clemson University, the woman said, according to court records. What allegedly came next follows a familiar pattern in the accusations against the iconic entertainer.
The woman, an anonymous Jane Doe accuser in a 2005 civil lawsuit against Cosby, said she rubbed Cosby’s belly.
That’s when the story goes foggy.
The woman said she passed out. Her accusation, which has not previously been reported, adds to the mountain of publicly known allegations leveled against the 79-year-old as his case on charges of sexually assaulting a woman he was mentoring slogs through a Pennsylvania court. (Cosby and his attorneys have vigorously denied that he sexually assaulted any women.)
The newly surfaced accusations come from a woman known in the 2005 civil suit as Jane Doe No. 6, according to sources who declined to be identified because of ongoing legal cases. Her claim, as well as those of another woman, whom sources identified as Jane Doe No. 8, raises the total number of confirmed Cosby accusers catalogued by The Washington Post from 58 to 60.
Dozens of women have held news conferences or given media interviews to outline their accusations against Cosby, but others have chosen to remain anonymous, even as they have provided detailed accounts of their allegations to attorneys in civil suits or investigators.
Among those who have not spoken publicly are four of the 12 Jane Doe accusers who were prepared to testify in the civil lawsuit filed in 2005 against Cosby by Andrea Constand, a former Temple University women’s basketball official. The Post is publishing only the names of those who have spoken publicly about their allegations.
The Constand lawsuit ended in a confidential settlement. Cosby has now been criminally charged with sexually assaulting Constand.
The allegations of Jane Doe No. 8, a modeling agency booker, also date back to the mid-1980s. A friend of hers, a male model named Tony Hogue, said in an interview that she was frantic when she called him from Cosby’s Manhattan home late one night in 1984.
The woman, who’d been to dinner with Cosby and one of the models from her agency that night, pleaded with Hogue to come get them. She said her “clothes were messed up,” Hogue recalled, and she was “very uncomfortable” because Cosby was kissing and touching her.
Hogue said he initially suggested that his friend ask Cosby’s driver to take her to the apartment where she was staying. Her response unnerved him: “She said she couldn’t even really move.”
Hogue, who first gave an account of that evening to the Daily Beast, said he banged on Cosby’s door for a long time. Finally the comedian answered, he said, acting as though nothing was wrong. Hogue left with his friend and the model, a woman named Beth Ferrier, who would later become Jane Doe No. 5.
“They were such a mess that there wasn’t a lot of conversation,” he said.
During a deposition related to the civil lawsuit, Cosby said he did not know Jane Doe No. 6 or Jane Doe No. 8.
A Pennsylvania state judge has ruled that Cosby should stand trial in the case but no date has been set. A pretrial conference is slated for early September.
The accusers could play a significant role if the case goes to trial because Pennsylvania law allows testimony in sexual assault cases by other women who make similar allegations. Prosecutors have said Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted Constand at his suburban Philadelphia estate. Forty-one of the 60 accusations analyzed by The Post involve allegations of drugging.
In a sense, the Jane Does have been through a screening process because they were selected by Constand’s legal team as the 2005 civil lawsuit was being prepared.
“We were vetted,” one Jane Doe said in an interview on the condition of anonymity because of legal sensitivities associated with the ongoing criminal case. “We were chosen.”