How One Cosby Survivor Helps Others Heal Through Music
A couple of years ago when I asked Heidi Thomas to be part of my podcast CHASING COSBY, which is based on my book of the same name, she was reluctant at first. She was tired of being accused of being an attention seeker; of relishing the media spotlight; of wanting her 15 minutes of fame. As if any woman wants to be famous for being raped.
I understood. It’s a conundrum I’ve seen happen time and again in sexual assault cases, especially ones involving rich and powerful men. If their accusers don’t reveal their identities, nobody believes them. If they do summon up the courage to allow their name and photo to be used in an interview and the person they’re saying did unspeakable things to them is a beloved public figure like Bill Cosby, well then they get the sort of backlash Thomas is talking about. It was particularly bad with those accusing Cosby because so many of his fans still believe he is Cliff Huxtable, the lovable patriarch he portrayed in The Cosby Show, and are reluctant to part ways with their beliefs about who they think he is.
Thomas was one of five women who were so-called 404b witnesses at Cosby’s second trial in April 2018. Cosby was charged with three counts of aggravated indecent assault for drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand at his Elkins Park, Pa. mansion in January 2004. He claims it was consensual. These five other women testified about being drugged and sexually assaulted by Cosby to show a similar pattern of behavior to buttress Constand’s account.
Thomas did finally agree to be interviewed for my podcast, not because she wanted to talk yet again about what she said Cosby had done to her in 1984, but because she wanted to spread the word about her new passion, Health Through Music, an endeavor she started in 2019 but only recently got up and running again due to the pandemic. It’s a new way to use the music that has been such a part of her life for so long. And the idea only came to her because of her fellow Cosby “sister survivors” as they call themselves.
In the days and years since she first revealed publicly that Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted her, Thomas had come to know many of the 60-plus women who say he did the same thing to them.
And she noticed what she thought might be a pattern.
“It occurred to me that some of us, myself included, have a good life, solid families, things have been okay,” said Thomas, 62, a former elementary school music teacher, who is married with three adult daughters. “And some of us were destroyed by the man. I mean, their lives tanked. And everything in-between. And I got to wondering why that was.”
She’d read about the resiliency factor and knew some people had it while other didn’t, but she thought there might be more to it than that.
“I thought, ‘Well one person I know that’s handled it really well is a music teacher in New York,’ ” she said. “And there’s another one that teaches music in her school in Nevada. And there are a couple of professional singers in California. And the more I thought about it, the more I saw that the ones I know of that have weathered the storm often have had music as a pretty integral part of their lives.”
She started doing research and realized she was onto something. There are a lot of studies showing music has a healing effect on the brain.
“I learned that music is on the cutting edge of neuroscience and health right now,” she said. “Scientists can take human cells and look at them while music is being played and they can see how the cells respond and react. This is science. It’s quantifiable. It’s provable.”
Thus was born Health Through Music. Thomas does both live and virtual presentations at schools, hospitals and retirement centers, giving them tips and tools for how to use music for health and wellness. She’s played for overworked, burned out health-care workers; former inmates struggling to build a life outside prison walls and patients taking their last breaths.
“The purpose is to spread the message that this is a tool that is available to everybody and it’s free,” she said. “All you have to do is be taught a few things on how to use it intentionally, not just randomly turn it on.”
And she might never have stumbled upon it had it not been for what happened to her in 1984.
Thomas was a 24-year-old aspiring model and actress when she got a call from her agent at JF Images, a Denver-based modeling agency that also represented Beth Ferrier and Barbara Bowman, who would later come forward to say they, too, were drugged and sexually assaulted by Cosby.
“My agent told me a giant in the industry was interested in mentoring a promising young talent,” she said. “I was so excited! My agent thought I was a promising young talent.”
She soon learned this “giant” in the industry was none other than Bill Cosby himself, the famous actor and comedian, “which pretty much blew my mind,” she said.
Her agent said Cosby wanted to do “one-on-one” acting and coaching with her. There was just one catch: It would have to be in Reno, Nevada, because he was performing at Harrah’s, a casino hotel. Her modeling agency would foot the bill for her travel.
Cosby called her, then chatted with her parents, putting their minds at ease about the out-of-town mentoring trip.
“He just seemed to be everything that everyone always knew about him,” she said. “He seemed to be kind and funny and very casual.”
She felt no trepidation whatsoever.
“I was just blown away that I was going to get an opportunity for acting coaching from this giant,” she said.
Thomas was given the full celebrity treatment. Cosby sent a car to pick her up at her home and take her to the airport in Denver and another to pick her up from the airport in Reno. But instead of taking her to Harrah’s, the driver headed out of the city.
“I said, ‘I thought we were going to Harrah’s,’ ” she said. “And he said, ‘Oh, there’s been a change of plans and Mr. Cosby is actually staying at a home that belongs to a friend of his so you’re going to be out there. And again, I didn’t think about it. I thought, ‘OK,’ because the driver explained that this way he had no paparazzi following him around.”
When they arrived at the big, sprawling house where Cosby was staying (it turned out it belonged to the owner of Harrah’s and appears to be the same one where Janice Baker-Kinney says Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted in 1982) she walked up to the door and rang the doorbell.
“I remember wondering if the doorbell would actually shake because I was shaking so much,” she said.
Cosby was kind and cordial and “everything that we all felt he was,” and told her driver to take her bags up to her room.
That’s when she realized she wasn’t staying at a hotel. Still, she wasn’t worried. She trusted him. Why wouldn’t she? There had never been a whiff of scandal throughout his 20-some year career.
Thomas sat down at the kitchen table and performed a monologue. Cosby wasn’t impressed and handed her a script he wanted her to read. The scene took place in a bar and the character was supposed to be intoxicated. He read with her on this one. Once again, he wasn’t impressed.
“Heidi, have you ever been drunk?” he asked.
“No, not really because I really don’t drink,” she replied.
“How do you expect to ever play any kind of role where you need to have been drinking if you’ve not experienced it?” he asked.
She told him she’d seen plenty of drunk people in college, even cared for some of them, so if anything it gave her a better idea of how drunk people behave.
Cosby persisted, asking her if she did drink, what would it be. The only alcoholic drinks she’d ever had in her life were a Pina Colada and a glass of white wine so she went with the latter.
He disappeared into another room and quickly came back with what she thought was a glass of white wine.
“Just use it as a prop,” Cosby told her. “I want you to sip on it a couple of times and then let’s see if we can get you in the frame of mind a little better.”
She took one sip – and after that everything that happened over the next four days are a blur of snapshot images. She doesn’t even know what order they happened in but many involve she and Cosby and various sex acts. In one she’s backstage in his dressing room with a teacart loaded with wine. She has photos from that trip that she doesn’t recall taking. She doesn’t remember getting taken back to the airport, the flight home or her parents greeting her at the airport. It’s a complete blank.
After she got home, Thomas was confused and even a little embarrassed. She couldn’t remember if they finished the monologue; if she ever got any coaching. She was a note taker and she didn’t even have notes. Did I forget it all? she wondered. The only person who had the answers she was seeking was Cosby.
He’d told her to reach out anytime she had questions so she spoke with his handlers who told her Cosby was next performing in St. Louis but she’d have to pay for her hotel and airfare if she wanted to talk to him there. Once she arrived she was invited to dinner after the show but there were too many other people at the table so she had no chance to grab him privately and ask him, What happened?
At a loss, she asked someone to take a photograph of the two of them. She’s not sure why but more than 30 years later, that photo became an exhibit in Cosby’s second trial because it was proof she had met him.
The whole experience soured her on modeling and acting. She was an office temp for a while, then married and became a full-time mom to her three children. Once they were in school she learned the school was looking for a music teacher. It just so happened she had a music education degree so voila! Everything fell into place.
That weekend with Cosby became an even more distant memory.
And then came Hannibal Buress, whose routine about Cosby raping women went viral after a Philadelphia magazine reporter recorded a video of it then wrote about it in October 2014, setting off a chain reaction of events that led to 60-plus women revealing publicly that Cosby had drugged and/or sexually assaulted them, too.
Thomas was one of them, prompted by her husband who saw a TV interview with fellow Cosby accuser Barbara Bowman and thought it sounded remarkably similar to what she told him Cosby had done to her.
A mutual friend connected her with Bowman and Beth Ferrier and, a couple of months later, she decided to add her voice to the ever-growing chorus of women who were coming forward disturbed by the backlash against them.
“They were being lambasted in the press, saying they were out for money, they were out for their 15 minutes of fame,” she said. “And I knew that wasn’t true. I mean I didn’t even know most of these women but I knew that wasn’t true. So I decided to speak out as one person who could defend these women to say, ‘I believe them. I know they’re telling the truth and here’s why.’ ”
Afterward she teamed up with Ferrier to try to use the platform they now had to get some real change for other sexual assault victims.
“Beth Ferrier was a pit bull and and was working very hard to contact state representatives, state senators, anybody at the Colorado state government level to see if we could abolish the statute of limitations for sexual assault and rape,” she said. “And, since I was the only one in Denver along with her, she asked me if I would be willing to join forces. So we did and we were a formidable team.”
They weren’t able to abolish it, but they did get it extended from ten years to 20 years.
“We learned at the eleventh hour that there just wasn’t going to be the votes, so we compromised and got it extended to 20 years,” she said. “And, I figured baby steps are better than no steps at all.”
It couldn’t help them get justice, but maybe it could help others.
In February 2019, Thomas retired from her private piano and voice teaching studio to pursue Health Through Music full time. She loves every second of the work she’s doing. Teaching others how to use music to ease their pain just feels right.
“It’s exciting, it’s fulfilling and, to be very honest, it all grew out of trying to figure out why some of my sisters in this crime got through it and some of them have struggled so hard,” Thomas said. “I can honestly say that being a part of the Cosby crap, which is what I call it, has given me a whole new career at my age. My family calls it Heidi 2.0.”
Nicki Weisensee Egan is the author of the book CHASING COSBY, host and executive producer of the podcast based on the book, coauthor of VICTIM F and an investigative journalist. You can see more of her work at https://www.nicoleweisenseeegan.com/