Producer's Wife: Bill Cosby Raped Me, Too

Cindra Ladd reveals her experience
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 27, 2015 10:57 AM CST
Producer's Wife: Bill Cosby Raped Me, Too
Comedian Bill Cosby performs at the Buell Theater in Denver, Saturday, Jan. 17, 2015.   (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)

The latest Bill Cosby accuser: Cindra Ladd, a former entertainment exec and wife of producer Alan Ladd Jr. In a Huffington Post column, she writes that she met Cosby in 1969, when she was 21 and he was 32, and gave him her number. He was married, but they started "hanging out," and he was always "a perfect gentleman." Until one night when they met at an apartment Cosby said belonged to a friend. Ladd had a headache, and he gave her a capsule he said was a "miracle cure." When she asked what it was, he simply said, "Don't you trust me?" After taking it, as she walked to a movie with Cosby, she felt like she was floating, but much of the evening is "a blur." What she does remember: "waking up the next morning nude in the bed of his friend's apartment and seeing Cosby wearing a white terrycloth bathrobe and acting as if there was nothing unusual."

"It was obvious to me that he had had sex with me," she writes. "I was horrified, embarrassed, and ashamed. There was a mirror above the bed, which shocked me further." They made some "awkward small talk" and she left, and though she cried the whole way home, "it never occurred to me to go to the police," she writes. "It was a different time and 'date rape' was a concept that didn't exist." She didn't tell anyone other than her roommate until nine years ago, when another woman's allegations against Cosby went public and she finally told her husband; this is the first time she's gone completely public with her story. To people wondering "why now," she writes, "I would ask these people to remember that up until relatively recently, prosecuting rape was a 'he said/she said' proposition where the victim was blamed for having worn 'suggestive clothing' or questioned as to why she went somewhere with her rapist." Click for her full column. (More Bill Cosby stories.)

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