LOS ANGELES (KNX) – A former Playboy model filed a lawsuit against Bill Cosby for sexually assaulting her in 1969.
The lawsuit was filed under a new California law that temporarily lifts the statute of limitation on civil sexual assault cases. Under the law, those who claim they were sexually assaulted are allowed to seek damages even if it happened outside the statute of limitations.
In an interview with KNX News, Victoria Valentino, the woman suing Cosby, said she had met him a few weeks prior to the incident during an audition, right after her son died.
"I had gone to the studio and, he actually had me come to his trailer to be interviewed and I handed him a picture of my son and he stared at it and held it for so long,” she recalled. “And I rattled off my story about my son's drowning and my recording contract with Capital and, you know, everything that happened and, he just stared and didn't speak and it got so uncomfortable that I stood up abruptly, took my picture back and left never expecting to ever see him again or hear from him about work.”
A few weeks later, she said she was at lunch with a friend of hers.
Valentino said Cosby made his way over after he had seen her crying.
“…When he saw me crying, he used that as an opening to speak to my roommate who was rather striking, looking and mesmerizing eyes,” she said. “And he suggested that it would do me good to go to a spa, get a steam bath, get a massage and he wanted to treat us to that and then he would send his car to our house, where we were living at my grandma's house in West Hollywood actually. And he would take us out to dinner and we were touched by that. We thought that was very kind of him, and so he gave my roommate his telephone number, his direct line and some money to pay for the steam bath and massage.”
The women later met Cosby at a restaurant called “Sneaky Pete.”
“So while we were sitting there, he was chatting us up and making silly jokes and I was not feeling very, sociable and I was pretty much rearranging the food on my plate and not being as responsive to his jokes as I think he would have liked,” she went on.
That’s when she said Cosby offered her a pill and said, “Here, take this, it'll make you feel better. It'll make us all feel better.”
She said Cosby then “acted like he was taking a pill, putting it up to his mouth and covering his hand with his other hand.” Valentino and her friend then took the pill he gave them.
“..Then in a minute, he reached over and popped another pill directly into my mouth and hers,” she said. “And pretty soon our faces were falling down into the plate.”
After telling Cosby she wanted to go home, he led the women to the parking lot where they saw the chauffeur was gone. Cosby then got them into his car.
“Instead of turning right down onto the strip to take us to our house…he took a left and went up into the Hollywood Hills and weaving around and we were feeling, you know, just spinning out,” she said. “You know, I was feeling like I was gonna throw up and, you know, we were just kind of wobbling around. I was in the back seat, she was in the front seat and then all of a sudden the car abruptly stopped and, he said, oh, I want to take you up to my office and show you my awards for ‘I Spy.’ And I thought, ‘oh God, I just wanna go home,’ but he took her out of the car and I thought, well, I'll just wait here and let her see his awards since he was clearly more interested in her than me.”
She said he brought them into the house.
“I went and sat to the one that was parallel to the front door and I put my head back and closed my eyes,” she said, and I don't know, I think I must have passed out and then all of a sudden it became very silent and that was what woke me up and I looked around thinking they had left me and then I discovered no, they hadn't left me,” she said. “He was sitting next to her with his hips adjacent to hers and looking down on her like a hawk and then I saw the bulge in his pants and I realized what was going to happen and I wasn't going to allow her to be raped while she was unconscious.”
Valentino said she tried to get a hold of her friend but was struggling due to effects of the pill.
“I felt like Frankenstein, you know, groping and trying to get his attention and I couldn't get my words out…(Cosby) kept ignoring me and then I started seeing his face getting irritated and then he started getting very irritated and he stood up and he walked towards me angrily and I got scared and I stood up and then my knees collapsed and I reached out and grabbed on to him to keep from falling,” she went on. “And the next thing I knew I was on my knees, next to the love seat and he was sitting down and zipping his fly.”
She said when Cosby was done with her, he told her to “call a cab” before leaving. Valentino said she shook her friend awake. The two women tried to place a call for home when they noticed there wasn’t a dial tone on the floor. They then saw the phone chord was a cut cloth chord.
She and her friend ran out of the apartment where her friend was able to “miraculously” hail a cab.
After that night, Valentino said she became suicidal and that her old self died. Eventually, she said she left Los Angeles.
“I walked away from my family from my career,” she said. “I walked away from everything, my parents, my son's grave. And I lived in a dirt-floored garage in Topanga Canyon for nine months being very soft, destructive.”
She said she filed the lawsuit after being approached by former Senator Joe Dunn.
“I was informed that [AB 2777] was signed into law and I had a one-year window and it was just simply time,” she said. “It was time for justice for me.”
Cosby’s representative, Andrew Wyatt, said in a statement to TMZ, "Media needs to vet Victoria Valentino cautiously and carefully -- because she has changed her alleged accounts of sexual abuse at the hands of Mr. Cosby over 10 to 15 times."
Cosby has been accused by 60 women of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment. In September 2018, he was sentenced three to 10 years for the sexual assault of Andrea Constand in 2004. He was released from prison in 2021 after his conviction was overturned.
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