According to reports, Bill Cosby asked a talent agency to send him broke and out-of-town models.
In a new report by Gawker, Bill Cosby’s deposition in 2005 recently revealed how the comedian made arrangements with a New York modeling agency in the 1980s to set up dinners in his dressing room with young, struggling models from outside New York. At least one of the women who dined with Cosby later accused him of pressuring her into sex.
The Washington Post reports that Cosby told the modeling agency owner Sue Charney he was looking to meet in the Cosby Show studio with girls who were “not financially doing well,” and saw it as a “present” Charney could offer her clients.
“It’s a very, very good meal, probably better than anything they’ve had the time that they’re in New York,” Cosby said in 2005, describing the arrangement under questioning.
Jennifer Thompson, a 17-year-old aspiring actress who wanted to move to New York, was one of the women who accepted Cosby’s offer. She would later become one of the 13 witnesses who joined Andrea Constand’s 2005 lawsuit against Cosby, which was later dismissed a year later.
“He promised my parents he’d take care of me. The first time I met him, I had tears in my eyes,” she told People last year under a pseudonym.
Her parents agreed to let her move to New York only because of Cosby’s assurances he’d take care of her, she said, but it became clear to her that Cosby had more in mind than helping an aspiring actress.
“He said, ‘Get that magazine, pick an outfit and I’ll get you that outfit. You’ll wear that outfit and we’ll go out to a nice dinner. And then you can come back here,’ “ she told People,“ ‘and you can have Amaretto, your favorite, and you’ll be tired so you can just stay here and sleep on the couch.’”
Eventually, she said, Cosby pressured her for sex at his home, and she reluctantly gave him a handjob. She said he gave her $700 before she left. He responded in the deposition that any touching he had done had been consensual.
Similar to the plaintiff in the 2005 case, Andrea Constand, alleged that Cosby offered her money for education as an incentive to make the damaging accusations to go away.
“Defendant admitted to the police and in his deposition that the plaintiff and her mother did not ask for money or the “educational trust” which he called to offer to her after the initial phone conversation with plaintiff and her mother. He further admitted that he had previously used the “educational trust” device to pay one of the Rule 415 witnesses, when he believed that she was going to reveal their liaison,” Constand’s attorney wrote in the newly unsealed documents.
