NEW YORK – The online streaming service Netflix has scrapped its Bill Cosby special after two more women have come forward to say the comedian sexually assaulted them.
“At this time we are postponing the launch of the new stand up comedy special ‘Bill Cosby 77′,” Netflix said in a statement.
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The special was to have been made available around Thanksgiving.
Two women, including former model Janice Dickinson, went public Tuesday with accusations that the comedian sexually assaulted them.
In an “Entertainment Tonight” interview that aired Tuesday night, Dickinson said that the 1982 incident occurred in Lake Tahoe, California, where he was appearing.
She told the TV newsmagazine that she wrote about the assault in her 2002 autobiography, “No Lifeguard on Duty: The Accidental Life of the World’s First Supermodel,” but that Cosby and his lawyers pressured her and the publisher to remove the details.
Cosby’s lawyer Martin Singer told The Wrap that Dickinson’s claim was an “outrageous defamatory lie.”
“Neither Mr. Cosby or any of his attorneys were ever told by Harper Collins that Ms. Dickinson had supposedly planned to write that he had sexually assaulted her, and neither Mr. Cosby or any of his representatives ever communication [sic] with the publisher about any alleged rape or sexual assault about the book,” Singer said.
In the interview, Dickinson said she met Cosby in Lake Tahoe at his urging after he said that he would help her with her singing career. They had met earlier when her agent had introduced them, hoping that she could get a job on “The Cosby Show.”
Dickinson said that after dinner, she and Cosby were in her hotel room and that he gave her some red wine and a pill. She told “Entertainment Tonight” she had asked for a pill because she had been suffering stomach pains.
“The next morning I woke up and I wasn’t wearing my pajamas and I remembered before I passed out I had been sexually assaulted by this man,” she said. She said she remembered Cosby dropping the robe he had been wearing and getting on top of her.
She said she never confronted Cosby about the incident.
Cosby, 77, who was never criminally charged in any case, settled a civil suit in 2006 with another woman over an alleged incident two years before.
Attention to the legendary entertainer’s past flared suddenly in recent weeks after another comic, Hannibal Buress, called Cosby a “rapist” during a Philadelphia performance. Two other women have emerged as accusers, including Barbara Bowman, who wrote an online Washington Post piece.
Another Cosby attorney, John P. Schmitt, issued a statement Sunday saying his client would not dignify “decade-old, discredited” claims of sexual abuse with a response. Schmitt later exempted the 2006 civil case from the blanket statement.
Cosby still has a sitcom in development with NBC for 2015.
- The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Article source: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/11/voting-problems-112511.html
NEW YORK – The online streaming service Netflix has scrapped its Bill Cosby special after two more women have come forward to say the comedian sexually assaulted them.
“At this time we are postponing the launch of the new stand up c...
entertainment
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