Philanthropist and former entertainment executive Cindra Ladd wrote an op-ed on Monday accusing Bill Cosby of drugging and raping her back in 1969. The embattled comedian has now been accused of rape, sexual assault or drugging by approximately 30 women, with many of them only coming forward in recent months.
“It was obvious to me that he had had sex with me,” she wrote in a Huffington Post blog. “I was horrified, embarrassed and ashamed. There was a mirror above the bed, which shocked me further.”
Ladd, wife of Oscar-winning Hollywood producer Alan Ladd Jr. (“Blade Runner”), said she met Cosby while he was married and she was a single, 21-year-old New York City resident. She said she gave him her number willingly and the two started hanging out, eating hot dogs together and sharing pizza.
One night they were supposed to see a movie, but she said she had a “terrible headache.” He offered her a pill.
“I asked a couple of times what it was,” she wrote. “Each time he reassured me, asking, ‘Don’t you trust me?’ Of course I did. This was Bill Cosby.”
After that, she said her memory was a blur. She vaguely recalled watching a Japanese samurai movie, but not much else.
“I don’t remember where the theater was nor very much of the evening,” she wrote. “What I do recall, vividly and clearly, is 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.”
She said she was in disbelief after the incident, but didn’t alert the authorities. “It never occurred to me to go to the police,” she wrote. “It was a different time and ‘date rape’ was a concept that didn’t exist.
Ladd thought she was the only who Cosby had assaulted, until other women started coming forward.
“I told my story to our attorney, who is also a good friend, because I was considering going public then, but eventually chose not to because the case was settled,” she wrote. “This is the first time I have chosen to speak out about that night. It is also the last time I intend to address it publicly.
“I have no plans to sue, I don’t want or need money. I have no plans for a press conference or for doing any interviews,” she added.
Ladd said she has ran into Cosby once since then. “In the years since that night I have crossed paths with Cosby only once, when my husband, a highly successful Oscar-winning film executive and producer, introduced me to him,” she wrote. “I was shaking, wondering if he would recognize me by my unusual first name. His reaction spoke volumes. To Bill Cosby, I was just another stranger.”
Ladd joins a growing list of women who have accused Cosby of similar crimes, including former supermodels Beverly Johnson and Janice Dickinson.
As a result of the allegations, Cosby’s comedy project with NBC was killed and Netflix pulled a stand-up special it had planned to premiere on Thanksgiving. Additionally, dozens of performances on his current stand-up tour have been canceled. Several of his stand-up performances went ahead as scheduled, however, causing outraged ticket holders who couldn’t get refunds to protest the event.
In a statement previously issued to TheWrap, Cosby attorney Martin Singer denounced the star’s accusers: “The new, never-before-heard claims from women who have come forward in the past two weeks with unsubstantiated, fantastical stories about things they say occurred 30, 40, or even 50 years ago have escalated far past the point of absurdity.”