How One Cosby Survivor Found Her Voice - and Why She Will Never Stop Using It

Stacey Pinkerton will be the keynote speaker at a sexual assault event tonight

I first got to know Stacey Pinkerton after the Bill Cosby sentencing in September 2018.

She was one of eight Cosby survivors who spoke at a press conference afterward since Pennsylvania law forbade them from speaking in court about the lifelong harm being drugged and sexually assaulted had on them. Stacey was the only one of the eight who’d never revealed her identity publicly before.

She didn’t say much that day; just that he drugged and sexually assaulted her in 1986, and that the experience left a permanent mark. “No matter what, these things stay with you forever,” she said. “It affects your health and your trust. I tried to block it out and kept going …. The 32 years I had endured finally came to a closure this week.”

We later connected on Facebook, but I didn’t reach out to her for a follow-up interview. (I covered the second trial and sentencing for the Daily Beast.) I know how much courage it takes to speak up against a man as revered and powerful as Bill Cosby and I could tell she was still a bit fragile. I also know sexual assault victims often experience backlash after coming forward, unlike with any other violent crime, and didn’t know what kind of a response she got afterward.

In late December 2018, as I was finishing up the final edits of my book CHASING COSBY, Stacey reached out to me to see if I would come on her radio show. She wanted to talk about her own experience as well, so I asked her if she wanted me to include it in my book. After thinking about it for a few days, she agreed. Thankfully, though I was long past the initial deadline, (I had to write it in two months!), my editor gave me the green light to make room for Stacey in the epilogue.

As is the case with so many of the women Cosby preyed upon, hers was a harrowing, heartbreaking tale.

Stacey was a 21-year-old flight attendant when she first met Cosby. She'd shared a limousine from her hotel to the airport with Cam Cooper, one of Cosby's assistants, at the suggestion of the hotel manager. They chatted a bit on the ride then he introduced her to Cosby, who was sitting in first class, once they were on the plane. Cosby was charming and friendly - he even played the spoons for her - and asked her if she was modeling. She said she was, though she wasn’t represented by an agency, He offered to help with her career, but said she needed to come to New York City.

By the time Stacey got home to Chicago two days later, there were messages on her answering machine from both Cosby and Cooper, inviting her to New York. She happily accepted. In New York, Cosby began mentoring her, even getting her a role as an extra on The Cosby Show. He asked for her headshots before she headed home to Chicago, which she gave him.

         Cosby was generous with his time and attention, so Stacey had no reason to be suspicious when he invited her to dinner in Chicago with some friends a few weeks later. At dinner, she sat next to him, chatting and drinking a glass of wine; at one point, she left her chair to talk to some guests at the other end of the table. Then, a little while later, she went to the ladies room. She returned to find Cosby and the other dinner guests gone, and the maître d’ waiting for her.

          "Where is everyone?" she asked him. She was in a dreamlike state, unsure how long she’d been in the bathroom. “The driver knows where to take you," he replied, before ushering her into a limousine, which took her to the Drake Hotel.

Once inside, she asked the front desk staff where the Cosby party was, thinking maybe Cosby and his dinner guests had moved their get-together to the hotel. They were no help and refused to tell her if Cosby was even staying there.

Suddenly, she remembered something that had happened at the restaurant—before she had left the table for the ladies room, Cosby had shoved a key in her hand. He wouldn’t tell her what it was for, though she’d asked—maybe that was the clue to where he and his friends had gathered. Maybe they were somewhere else at the hotel. “What is this for?” she asked them. “And they looked at me and told me to go down the hall and take the elevator up to where the number is.”

A few minutes later, Cosby walked in. Alone.

“I have a present for you,” he said. “Come sit down and let’s talk.”

“No, I want to go home,” she said. “It’s really late.”

“No, I want you to sit down and take this present,” he insisted. “I want you to open it.”

“I can open it later,” she said. She was scared, making excuses, and was just trying to get away.

She looked around and saw champagne, flowers, and fruit on a table, and wondered what on earth she’d walked into. She opened the present, an oversized sweatshirt signed by Larry Bird, and he asked her to put it on. She tried every excuse of to avoid doing that, but she was frightened, and finally walked into the bathroom to put it on.

By then, she was starting to feel lightheaded, sweaty, and nauseous. When she emerged from the bathroom, he said, “Come over here and sit down. I want to talk to you about modeling.”

“No. I’m not interested,” she told him. “I’m leaving.”

She walked toward her purse, and he grabbed her, kissed her, and forced her down onto the bed.

“I couldn’t get out of the room,” she said. “I started looking for any excuse. I told him I wasn’t interested in him. I had a boyfriend. You’re married. There’s an HIV crisis. I told him every excuse because this was at the point it was forceful. I said ‘No.’ I said about every thing you could think of.”

She was now feeling so weak she couldn’t push him off of her. “I kept saying, No! No! It was if I was completely paralyzed. “

The last thing she remembers before she passed out is seeing his face two inches from her own. When she came to, it was about 3:30 in the morning. Cosby was snoring beside her. She quietly gathered her things, worried about what he’d do to her if he woke up, staggered down to the lobby, and, shaking with fear, told the front desk staff to call the police. Three times.

They were hesitant, and kept asking her “why?” They weren’t moving fast enough for her, so she walked out of the hotel, flagged down a taxi, and asked the driver to take her to the police station. She didn’t know which one to go to, though, which gave her time to think.

“I remembered there had been something in the media a few weeks prior about a woman who was sexually assaulted and the press just ate her alive,” she told me when I interviewed her for CHASING COSBY, the podcast based on my book. “I started thinking, ‘Do I want to be in the press? No. Can I fight him? No.’ And I thought if I went to the police, it would get out in the public. So I just told the driver to take me home.”

She told her boyfriend what happened when she got back to their apartment, and, later, various friends, but shelved any notion of reporting Cosby to the police. She knew they wouldn’t believe her. He was America’s Dad, after all, and she was terrified of the repercussions that speaking out about him might bring.

After that night, Stacey’s stability was shattered. She moved from city to city, trying to forget what happened, but being reminded every time she saw him on television. In desperation, she finally moved to Spain in 1989. He wasn’t as well-known in Europe, and she hoped this would give her the peace she so desperately needed.

      "I thought, ‘ I don’t have to see him on television. I don’t have to see those commercials,” she told me. “I left my career, my friends, my family.”

Stacey learned the language, built a new career, got married, and tried to put it all behind her. She doesn’t recall ever seeing or hearing any news coverage of former Temple University employee Andrea Constand’s drugging and sexually allegations against him when she went to the police in 2005.

But when the scandal exploded into the news again in the fall of 2014, and more and more women began revealing they’d been Cosby had drugged and sexually assaulted them as well, friends she’d told over the years began sending her messages urging her to come forward. After Cosby was arrested for Constand’s assault on December 30, 2015, she finally contacted detectives on the case and agreed to be a so-called 404b corroborating witness. The judge ended up allowing only one other victim to testify at the first trial, and five at the second, but she wasn’t one of the ones chosen.

         When news of Cosby’s conviction reached her, she knew she had to attend his sentencing, for her own sense of justice, and maybe some closure, too. Both days, she sat in the courtroom with fellow Cosby survivors Lise Lotte-Lublin, Chelan Lasha, and former supermodel Janice Dickinson, all of whom testified at the second trial. I remember sitting behind them and wondering who she was.

I found out at the victims' press conference, which was held a few blocks from the courthouse in Norristown, Pa. Finally speaking out publicly was “liberating,” she told me. So was his prison sentence. “With him behind bars, I feel safer."

Still, much of that night remains missing from her memory. Did he put something in her glass of wine at the restaurant? Or in her food? Like so many of the other Cosby survivors, she realizes she’ll probably never get that answers to those questions. And, like so many of them, she knows she just has to live with that.

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Once Stacey found her voice, though, nothing was going to stop her from using it. After my book came out, The [London] Times Magazine published a lengthy interview with her. She also recently appeared in Kamau Bell’s docuseries We Need to Talk About Cosby and a Q and A after its debut at the Sundance Film Festival.

More important to her than the media attention, though, is raising awareness, through speaking engagements and teaching classes, about abuse of power, removing statutes of limitation on sexual assault and rape for both children and adults, and defining consent, issues that are all near and dear to her heart.

She intends to touch on all of these subjects tonight, when she will be the keynote speaker at the NWA Center for Sexual Assault’s Voices 2022 Gala in Springdale, Arkansas, not far from where she grew up and where she still spends part of each year.

“I am very passionate about using my voice for others to learn from my experiences,” she told me, and wants everyone, not just fellow sexual abuse survivors, to know “that is it never too late to use theirs.”

I’m certain this won’t be the last we hear from her.