Comedian Bill Cosby is getting some Colorado heat in People magazine this week. Two former Denver models say he drugged and sexually molested them in the 1980s when they were working for Jo Farrell’s JF Images modeling agency. Farrell says this is all news to her – unsettling news she finds “mind boggling.”
The allegations came out after Cosby settled out of court last month a civil lawsuit charging him with sexual assault and drugging a woman in Philadelphia in 2004.
The trial had 13 witnesses lined up, listed as “Jane Does,” who stood ready to testify of similar experiences with the comic.
Barbara Bowman and Beth Ferrier were two of the 13, and both are both interviewed and pictured in the People story. They were both represented by J.F. Images when they were introduced to Cosby in the ’80s. (Neither woman has come forward before and they do not stand to profit from the allegations as the statute of limitations has expired, according to People.)
Bowman, who is married and now lives in a Phoenix suburb, was 18 when she says Farrell arranged to have her meet Cosby at a Denver nightclub, Turn of the Century. People magazine says Farrell then arranged for Bowman to move to NYC, where her professional relationship with Cosby continued. Bowman says that in a Reno hotel in 1986, “(Cosby) took my hand and his hand over it, and he masturbated with his hand over my hand.”
She goes on to say that soon she was in a NYC townhouse with Cosby, who gave her a glass of red wine. “The next thing I know, I’m sick and nauseous and I’m delusional and I’m limp and … I can’t think straight … And I just came to, and I’m wearing a (men’s) T-shirt that wasn’t mine and he was in a white robe.”
That’s some way to wake up.
Ferrier, a single mom who still lives in Denver, says she was introduced to Cosby by Farrell in the mid-’80s. She tells People that Cosby was her mentor, a “father figure” to her, when she drank some cappucino in his Denver dressing room and blacked out.
“I woke up in my car in the parking lot with my clothes all a mess,” she tells People. “I was definitely drugged. All I had to drink was coffee and the room was spinning. Then I wake up with my clothes a mess and my bra unhooked. I wondered, I still wonder, ‘What did he do with me? Why was my bra unhooked? What happened?”‘
Ferrier went on to have a “on-and-off” consensual affair with Cosby for several years. Ferrier could not be reached Tuesday.
People attempted to contact Cosby for a response to the allegations, but his longtime publicist David Brokaw said Cosby had no comment.
Farrell – who proudly turns 75 in January and now runs The Farrell Group, a firm that teaches communication skills – on Tuesday told me, “I am just floored by this. I don’t know the truth of it. Bill has been a good friend over the years and I have never seen him be anything but a gentleman. I know these girls and I am not going to comment on them. But these women never said anything to me about this. And the innuendo is that I kind of put (her) in there with Bill.
“It’s mind boggling. 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.”
Bill Husted’s column appears Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. Husted also appears Tuesdays and Fridays on “Good Day Colorado” on Fox 31. You can reach him at 303-954-1486 or at bhusted@denverpost.com.
