Photo via Flickr user Chris Favero
This week, Bill Cosby’s late-career comeback suddenly imploded. With the world now paying attention to Barbara Bowman’s decade-old account of her experiences with Cosby, and Janice Dickinson’s claim that Cosby sexually assaulted her in 1982, NBC decided to cancel a planned new Cosby series and Netflix postponed its release of Cosby’s latest comedy special.
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But the comedy legend’s bad behavior has been a gossip topic for decades. While discussing Dickinson’s allegations on Wednesday, talk show host Wendy Williams described how Cosby allegedly tried to get her fired from a radio host job in 1990 after she mentioned rape allegations against Cosby on the air. Williams told her studio guests:
Once upon a time, I worked at a radio station here in New York called 98.7 Kiss. I used to work with the morning show. I did this segment called “Dishing the Dirt,” which is like “Hot Topics.” I’ve been doing this for a long time, but back then—it was like 1990—there was no internet. You get your information from what you see when you’re out at the club or by reading the magazines. I was perusing the Enquirer magazine, and I came across an interview that they did with Dr. Cosby. Ironically, this is one of the only times he has ever spoken out about these sexual allegations, and it was to the Enquirer back then.
After reading the article, Williams did as Williams does and discussed the dirt on the air. Moments later, Cosby apparently called the radio station’s general manager. What happened next? We’ll let Williams take the tea spillage over from here:
[Cosby] demands for me to be fired, talked to the general manner in such a way that the general manager—my own boss—turned on me like a wild pit bull [and] called me into his office in the middle of the morning broadcast. Cosby’s on the speakerphone. Cosby dressed me down and called me everything but a daughter of God. Now, that’s my own personal account with these allegations, and this, like I said, was back in 1990.”
Through her representative, Williams declined to comment further on the subject. But her story correlates with several other Cosby-related events this week. The same day Williams told her story, Cosby’s lawyer, Marty Singer—who represented alleged twnk addict Bryan Singer (unrelated) during his alleged sex abuse scandal—sent a letter to Buzzfeed about that site’s coverage of Dickinson’s accusations, saying, “You proceed at your own peril.”
Unsurprisingly in the age of Twitter, Singer’s tactics have failed to shut anyone up. The day after the lawyer questioned Dickinson’s story, former Playboy model Carla Ferrigno said Cosby tried to sexually assault her in 1967, and Wednesday night, One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest actress Louisa Mortiz told TMZ Cosby pushed his dick in her mouth in the green room at The Tonight Show in 1971.
“[Cosby] took his hands and put them on the back of my head and forced his penis in my mouth, saying, ‘Have a taste of this. It will do you good in so many ways,’” Mortiz said. According to her account, Cosby also told her, “Now you don’t want to upset me and the plans for your future, do you?”
Despite the slew of new allegations, Cosby has refused to comment about any of this and continues to perform in Florida, the land of the perpetual American shitshow.
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