Plunging another stick into the icy-cold Jell-O pudding pop of the heart, the fall of Bill Cosby persists, necessitating yet another update on the story that has swaddled the comedian in so much ugliness, like a particularly ghastly sweater. On the heels of NBC and Netflix scrapping plans for new Cosby projects, now the allegations of sexual abuse are even affecting his past work: Yesterday, TV Land quietly pulled all episodes of The Cosby Show from its schedule, effective immediately. Meanwhile, all evidence of the series has been scrubbed from the channel’s website, a tangible expression of a society’s collective memories of Cosby as a lovable father figure. In their place, the poignant message: “We’re sorry, something went wrong.”
Those things continued to go wrong today, as another woman—Therese Serignese, a 57-year-old Florida nurse—has come to The Huffington Post to accuse Cosby of raping her when she was 19 years old, making her the seventh woman to do so publicly. Serignese says she had a chance encounter with Cosby in Las Vegas while he was performing at the Hilton in 1976, where he first approached her in the hotel gift shop, then had her escorted to his green room. She then tells a now all-too-familiar story of Cosby offering her pills, followed by a groggy realization that he was having sex with her.
Serignese also claims that she continued to have intermittent contact with Cosby—including allowing him to put her up in the Hilton penthouse “until he kicked her out after she had a pregnancy scare”—and even had another, apparently consensual sexual encounter with him in 1985. That relationship continued until well into the ’90s, when she accepted checks from him following a serious car accident. Nevertheless, she tells The Huffington Post that she remained angry about the 1976 incident, eventually becoming one of the 12 anonymous women who were ready to provide testimony in Andrea Costand’s 2005 suit against Cosby, which was settled out of court.
Cosby, of course, has not replied to this latest charge, though Cosby’s attorney, Marty Singer, has continued to go on the offensive against those who would report on it—or any of the allegations that have resurfaced in recent weeks. “You proceed at your peril,” Singer warned in a letter to BuzzFeed, after chastising the site for “disseminating the outrageous false story” set forward by Janice Dickinson, who claimed that Cosby had raped her in 1982. “If you recklessly publish the story instead of checking readily available information demonstrating its falsity, all those involved will be exposed to very substantial liability.”
As BuzzFeed notes, Singer has gained a reputation for taking on difficult celebrity clients and sending threatening letters as his first line of defense, distributing “menacing” missives on behalf of the likes of Charlie Sheen and John Travolta. (One such letter, sent in the midst of a lawsuit involving two reality show contestants squabbling over a broken restaurant partnership—and threatening to expose Famous Food host Mike Malin’s arrangement of “sexual liaisons with older men”—was characterized by a judge as “extortion.” Singer later beat that charge on appeal.)
While Singer does all of the aggressive guard dog work, Cosby himself has remained as silent as that initial NPR interview. And yesterday, the Associated Press released video of another interview that reveals the lengths to which Cosby has gone to stonewall journalists asking him about the allegations.