The Case Against Cosby: Sex-Assault Allegations Recast Star’s Legacy Read online

  They rode in silence. “He froze me out,” she said. He never tried anything again, she said, but Traitz could not keep the incident to herself. She told her co-workers and her family what happened at the time. She decided not to go to the police.

  “It was a different time,” her brother, Jim Traitz, told The Post. “We all also knew this was a really big guy with a big PR operation and lawyers, and that he could crush us — that he would crush us — and her.”

  Life has not been easy for Linda Traitz, who has a history of drug addiction. In the past decade, she has amassed a criminal record with multiple convictions, mostly related to prescription drugs, according to Florida court records. She received a five-year prison term, serving from 2008 to 2012.

  “I know there will be people who are going to say: ‘You have a drug problem. Why should we believe you?’ ” she said of her decision to go public now.

  Just as the allegations against Cosby span generational shifts in attitudes about what constitutes out-of-bounds behavior, they also span historic shifts in how information is disseminated. At the time when Traitz alleges Cosby assaulted her, there was no such thing as social media.

  But this month, two events compelled her to make a public statement. First, the comedian Hannibal Buress touched off a social-media frenzy by asking an audience at one of his shows to Google “Bill Cosby rapist.” Then, on Nov. 13, The Post published a first-person account by another accuser, Barbara Bowman. Traitz, furious about the attacks on Bowman and other Cosby accusers, posted her story on Facebook.

  Singer, Cosby’s attorney, called Traitz “the latest example of people coming out of the woodwork with unsubstantiated or fabricated stories about my client.”

  He added, “There was no briefcase of drugs and the story is absurd.”

  The Playmates

  Victoria Valentino was living what appeared to be a version of the Hollywood dream. Playboy magazine picked her as Playmate of the Month for September 1963 when she was just 19. The next year, she helped open the original Playboy Club as a bunny on the Sunset Strip on New Year’s Eve.

  But by the end of the decade, she had drifted away from those glitzy heights, she recalled in an interview with The Post. In September 1969, her 6-year-old son, Tony, had drowned in a swimming pool. She battled a deep depression, she recalled.

  Francesca Emerson, a fellow Playboy bunny who befriended Valentino at the Playboy Club, sensed her despondency. Emerson, who is black, said she was one of the first “chocolate Bunnies” of the 1960s and had trained Valentino in her role as a “Bunny instructor.”

  Emerson had a plan to lift Valentino’s spirits. “I want you to meet my friend, Bill Cosby,” she said.

  Emerson and Cosby had hit it off at the Playboy Club. “He always gave me $100 tips, and he tried to get me to come down to the studio to read for his show, but I was always so nervous.”

  After Emerson lost her job at the club in 1968, she said, a chauffeur arrived at her home and handed her an envelope. Inside was $1,000 and a note. “This is for you so you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. Love, Cos,” Emerson said it read.

  “That’s the Bill Cosby I knew,” Emerson said. “He was a perfect gentleman.”

  She said she introduced her “stunning” friend Valentino to Cosby in January 1970 at Cafe Figaro. Weeks later, she said, she met Cosby there again. Valentino said she was with her friend and roommate at the time, an aspiring actress named Meg Foster. She said Cosby offered to pay for massages for the women at a local spa and then sent a limousine to pick them up for dinner.

  Valentino said they had dinner at a restaurant called Sneaky Pete’s. They ordered steaks and wine, and toward the end of dinner, Valentino said, Cosby offered her and Foster red pills.

  “He was trying to cheer me up, and he stuck a pill in my mouth,” she said. “He said, ‘This will make us all feel better.’ ”

  She and Foster each took a pill, and Cosby did, too, she said.

  “We were slurring words. I couldn’t function,” she recalled, adding that Cosby said he would take them home but instead drove them to an apartment in the hills above the Chateau Marmont hotel. Valentino said Cosby wanted to show them some memorabilia from “I Spy.”

  Once inside, Valentino said, Foster passed out. The room was spinning, and Valentino said she remembered feeling as if she was going to throw up. She said she saw Cosby sitting in a love seat near Foster and she noticed that he had an erection.

  “I reached out, grabbing him, trying to get his attention, trying to distract him,” Valentino said. “He came over to me and sat down on the love seat and opened his fly and grabbed my head and pushed my head down. And then he turned me over. It was like a waking nightmare.”

  She protested but could not stop him, she said. Cosby slipped out alone, telling Valentino to call a cab if she wanted to go home, she said.

  Valentino said she never called the police. “What kind of credibility did I have?” she said. “In those days, it was always the rape victim who wound up being victimized. You didn’t want to go to the police. That’s the last thing you wanted to do back then.”

  She was too embarrassed to tell most of her friends, but she did tell Emerson — the woman who had introduced her to Cosby.

  Emerson, who lives in Australia, confirmed Valentino’s recollection in an interview with The Post.

  “I remember she said that he had drugged her and she came to and he was trying to rape Meg and she pulled him off,” Emerson said. “But I feel devastated that I didn’t do anything or say anything.”

  Foster, an actress known for roles in TV shows such as “Cagney and Lacey” and movies including “The Osterman Weekend,” declined an interview request.

  In 1996, Valentino was contacted by another former Playboy Playmate, Charlotte Kemp, Miss December 1982, who said she was writing a book called “Centerfold Memories,” which is due out in February.

  In an interview, Kemp — whose real last name is Helmkamp — said she videotaped an interview with Valentino during which she talked about her alleged encounter with Cosby. Helmkamp said the account she gave matches the account Valentino provided to The Post.

  Valentino, now 71, said she decided to come forward after seeing Bowman’s allegations in The Post.

  “Every time I hear his name mentioned and see him getting an honorary doctorate and see him as this father figure, it makes me nauseated,” Valentino said. “It’s so humiliating. Forty-four years later it makes me feel shameful.”

  When contacted by The Post about Valentino’s allegations, Cosby’s attorney responded by issuing the broad denial to the recent accusations.

  The protege

  He liked to watch her brush her hair, Tamara Green recalled. Cosby would sit and watch her pull the brush through her long, thick blond locks as she sang lyrics made famous by the sultry, smoky-voiced jazz great Julie London.

  “You need to be taught. You need to be groomed,” Green remembered him telling her.

  Green was in her early 20s when she met Cosby through a mutual friend, a Los Angeles doctor, she said. “He was king of the world,” Green said in an interview with The Post. “Full of himself. ‘I Spy.’ Man about town.”

  When Green met Cosby — in 1969 or 1970, she said — she was doing some modeling and singing. Los Angeles felt like the host of one long, awesome party. Knowing Cosby made it even more awesome.

  “We slept all day and were up all night,” Green said.

  It was a “very hippie-dippy, very free-love” time, Green said. The big shots in her circle of celebrity friends kept “stables of girls,” Green said. “They had a total disrespect for the girls.” Green did not want to be Cosby’s girl.

  Green went to work for Cosby in the early 1970s, she said. She was supposed to be raising money from investors for a new club Cosby intended to open.

  She called Cosby one day to say she was feeling sick and was going to go home. He told her she would feel better if she ate something
and invited her to join him at Cafe Figaro, she said. When she arrived, he gave her some red and gray pills, saying they were over-the-counter decongestants, she recalled.

  Cosby drove Green to her apartment and she started to feel woozy, she said. “I remember him being all smarmy: ‘Let me help you take off all your clothes,’ ” she recalled.

  “I couldn’t control my body. I couldn’t run,” Green recalled. “. . . He was naked. I was naked on my bed. His hands were all over me.”

  Cosby penetrated her vagina with his fingers and fondled his penis in front of her, Green said. She screamed in protest, she said. “You’re going to have to kill me,” she remembers telling him. But he would not stop, she said, until she managed to upend a table lamp.

  Cosby tossed down two $100 bills as he left, a gesture that Green took as a deep insult, she said. She did not think of herself as a girl who could be bought, but she felt helpless to do anything. She feared Cosby’s power. But there was another thing that she fretted about. Her young brother was dying from cystic fibrosis, and the day after the alleged incident, Cosby visited him at the children’s hospital where he was being treated, showing up with gifts and entertaining the other young patients, Green said. Her brother adored the star, and knowing Cosby gave him a certain cachet in the hospital ward and garnered him extra attention from nurses in his final days, she said. She worried about jeopardizing all that.

  Green, now 66, went on to become an attorney and got married. She is retired in Southern California, where she grapples with Parkinson’s disease and with the echoes of that long-ago alleged incident. She said she is forever checking the perimeter of her home. She still sleeps in her clothes.

  A previous Cosby attorney, Walter M. Phillips Jr., has called Green’s allegations “absolutely false.”

  “Mr. Cosby does not know the name Tamara Green or Tamara Lucier [her maiden name] and the incident she describes did not happen,” Phillips said in a statement issued in 2005 when the allegations first surfaced. He said it was “irresponsible” to publish an “uncorroborated story of an incident that is alleged to have happened thirty years ago.”

  Cosby’s legal team has also questioned Green’s credibility because her law license was suspended in 2004. Green said that the suspension resulted from an overdraft related to her depositing a retainer check in the wrong account and that her license was reinstated.

  Cosby’s team has also used legal-ethics issues to question the credibility of a more recent accuser who is now a lawyer — Louisa Moritz, an actress who appeared in the film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” On Thursday, Moritz told the Web site TMZ that Cosby forced her to have oral sex in a dressing room of “The Tonight Show” in 1971. Singer, Cosby’s attorney, questioned her credibility because she had been disciplined by the California State Bar last year in a dispute over a legal fee.

  His wife

  In 1971, seven years after their wedding, Cosby’s wife, Camille, remained committed to making their marriage work despite the distractions of Hollywood. They had met on a blind date at a bowling alley in the spring of 1963. He was a 25-year-old comedian who was in Washington for a gig at the Shadows, a small club in Georgetown. She was a teenage University of Maryland student.

  The parents of Camille Hanks worried she was too young. But the couple — whose early dates often ended at Ben’s Chili Bowl — began a long-distance relationship when Cosby returned to New York. The next year, Camille dropped out of college and her parents reluctantly gave their blessing to their 19-year-old daughter’s marriage.

  The ceremony, performed by Father Carl Dianda, was held in a large multipurpose hall at a Catholic church in Olney, Md.

  “They were well matched,” Dianda, who had three premarital meetings in the rectory with the young couple, said in an interview with The Post. “She was one of the most beautiful in that parish,” Dianda said, recalling that Cosby introduced himself to the priest by handing him one of his comedic records.

  Their move to Los Angeles as Cosby’s career rocketed in the mid- and late-1960s required adjustments. “All of a sudden we were successful people,” Camille Cosby recalled in an interview with Stephanie Stokes Oliver of Essence. “All of a sudden we had money coming in, and it changed our lives.”

  It’s unclear how much Camille knew about her husband’s activities during the Los Angeles years. Six of the sexual-abuse allegations against Cosby date to that period — Tarshis, Traitz, Green, Valentino and two other women: Carla Ferrigno, the future wife of “Incredible Hulk” star Lou Ferrigno, told KFI Radio that Cosby tried to assault her at his house in 1967. And Kristina Ruehli, now a 71-year-old grandmother of eight, told Philadelphia Magazine that she believes Cosby drugged her two years earlier and forced her to perform oral sex on him when she awoke.

  By 1971, the couple decided they needed to make a change. Camille would move with their three children to Shelburne Falls, Mass., and Cosby would shuttle between Los Angeles, where he would continue working, and the new family home. Camille wanted to extract her family from the toxic Hollywood culture that she felt had facilitated her husband’s “selfish” behavior, according to a biography of Cosby by former Newsweek managing editor Mark Whitaker that was published this month.

  The move gave Cosby an opportunity to live a kind of double life, Whitaker writes. In the East, Cosby was a family man studying for his PhD at the University of Massachusetts, raising money for Temple University scholarships and making a documentary about convicts seeking redemption. In the West, he could revel in “self-indulgence,” Whitaker writes. Later, Cosby would have a long run of comedy shows in Las Vegas, still far from his family. “After his second show was done, he could often be found playing blackjack or craps into the wee hours, betting thousands of dollars as well-liquored men and flirtatious women egged him on,” Whitaker wrote.

  With his wife more than 3,000 miles away, Cosby began an affair with Shawn Berkes, a secretary he met at a Los Angeles nightclub. Berkes later confronted Cosby and said that she had given birth to his child.

  The timing of that confrontation seems to coincide with a “turning point” at the 10-year mark in the Cosby marriage that was mentioned many years later by Camille Cosby in an interview. She told Oprah Winfrey that she and her husband had weathered some “selfish” behavior but opted to recommit to their relationship.

  In a court case more than two decades after Cosby’s affair, he testified that he paid $100,000 to keep his extramarital relationship secret. Berkes’s daughter — Autumn Jackson, who was by then an adult — would serve a prison term for extortion. Camille Cosby made it clear in her Winfrey interview that she was aware of the affair long before the extortion attempt.

  By the 1970s, Cosby’s career had slowed. His 1972 comedy-variety show lasted one season, and by 1974 he was turning to corporate advertising deals, including one that would define him almost as much as any television role he had played: serving as a television spokesman for Jell-O.

  With his career in a lull, Cosby renewed his pledges to his family. When he turned 40 in 1977, he vowed to “cut back” his “playboy ways,” according to the Whitaker biography. He would focus on his family and children.

  Throughout Cosby’s 1989 book, “Love and Marriage,” he paints his wife as ruler of the roost, and has said he modeled the TV character of Clair Huxtable on Camille, who was also a graceful mother of five. But unlike Clair, a successful lawyer, for many years Camille did not have a career outside the home.

  Their family life, however, was not the stuff of television sitcoms. Erinn Cosby, the family’s second-oldest daughter, was estranged from her father in the late 1980s. Bill Cosby told the Los Angeles Times: “She can’t come here. She’s not a person you can trust.” The family blamed the separation on drugs, which Erinn later denied.

  The agency

  Jo Farrell pursued clients so relentlessly that she became known as the “Red-headed Barracuda.” She operated her JF Images talent agency far from Hollywood in Denver, bu
t she wielded such clout that she could make or break careers.

  Farrell plays one of the more unusual roles in the decades-long drama of Cosby and his accusers. She referred two women to Cosby who later alleged he sexually abused them: Barbara Bowman and Beth Ferrier.

  Farrell is now 83 and suffering from dementia and Alzheimer’s, according to her daughter, Kathleen, who said in a recent interview with The Post that her mother retired five years ago and knew nothing about the claims of sexual abuse until they appeared in People magazine in 2006. “It’s mind-boggling,” Jo Farrell told the magazine at the time. “I don’t set up interviews in bars. Here I am pulled in on this, and it makes me sad because my reputation has always been golden in this city.”

  Farrell’s relationship to Cosby dates back decades. She first met him at the Turn of the Century nightclub, which was near her talent agency. Kathleen Farrell said Cosby worked with a number of the agency’s young female clients through the years, taking them on outings and asking them to auditions. She said she had heard allegations that other men — photographers and bookers — had abused actresses. But she said her mother never mentioned any complaints about Cosby. If she had heard complaints, she said, her mother would have severed her relationship with Cosby “to protect the girls.”

  “Nobody ever addressed with her that there was an issue,” Kathleen Farrell said. “She’s a mother hen; she would have addressed it.”

  Farrell discovered Bowman, then 13, at a 1980 beauty pageant.

  “She pulled me over and said, ‘What’s your name?’ ” Bowman, now 47, recalled in an interview. “She said I looked like a movie star. That was quite a compliment for a scrawny little kid trying to make it. . . . I was feeling really glamorous.”

  She said Cosby came to town in 1984 and Farrell took Bowman, now 17, to a comedy club for an audition. Bowman said she prepared a monologue and performed before one of the most famous comedians in the country in a small conference room tucked away inside the comedy club.