April 20, 2023 • 45 mins
For the first time, actress Lili Bernard reveals devastating details of the grooming, manipulation, torment and abuse she experienced at the hands of disgraced icon Bill Cosby.
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Guest Bio:
Lili Bernard is a Los Angeles-based actor and interdisciplinary visual artist born in Santiago de Cuba. Her artwork has been favorably reviewed in multiple mainstream art periodicals and exhibited widely, including in a 2017 solo show at Museum of African Diaspora in San Francisco. A graduate of the American School in Japan, Lili received her Masters in Fine Arts from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles and did her undergraduate studies at Cornell University and City University of New York, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in German. Her acting credits include The Cosby Show, Seinfeld, Stephen King’s Golden Years and the BBCs Murder in Oakland. A mother of six, Lili is also a writer, independent curator, community organizer and founder of BAILA: Black Artists in Los Angeles. A public-figure anti-rape activist and victims advocate, Lili helped abolish the statute of limitations on rape prosecution in California.
Guest Information:
- IMDb - https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0076302/bio
- Instagram - @lilibernard6
- Twitter - @LiliBernard
- YouTube - @LiliBernard6
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
What happens when America's dad is revealed to be a perpetrator.
Actress Lily Bernard knows all too well. On this emotional
episode of Navigating Narcissism, Lily bravely opens up for the
very first time about the horrific abuse she endured at
the hands of Bill Cosby. When Lily first met Cosby
(00:23):
in nineteen eighty nine, she was just beginning her career. He,
on the other hand, was one of the most famous, respected,
and beloved men in the world. Since then, over sixty
women have accused him of sexually assaulting, drugging, and raping them.
In twenty eighteen, Cosby was convicted and went to prison,
(00:45):
before being released on a legal technicality less than three
years later. His crimes have been the focus of documentaries
and news articles, but the experiences of the survivors are
often glossed over. What did the grooming process look like?
How did enablers and systems psychologically conspire to allow him
(01:08):
to keep perpetrating for decades? Even more important, what happens
to the survivors for years afterward. While this is a
story of sexual assaults, abuse, and perpetration, it is frankly
also a straight up story of narcissistic abuse. This is
Lily's harrowing journey of surviving Bill Cosby, not just what happened,
(01:34):
but what has happened to her since and the reality
of her healing process. This podcast should not be used
as a substitute for medical or mental health advice. Individuals
are advised to seek independent medical advice, counseling, and or
therapy from a healthcare professional with respect to any medical condition,
(01:59):
mental health issue, or health inquiry, including matters discussed on
this podcast. This episode discusses abuse, which may be triggering
to some people. The views and opinions expressed are solely
those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast,
(02:22):
and do not represent the opinions of Red Table Talk productions,
iHeartMedia or their employees. Thank you so much for coming
being here.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Here's where I'd like to begin. I truly believe that
one of the most difficult things about being a trauma
survivor is that people want you to keep sharing the
story of the trauma. What I'd like to have happened
today is your story and your experience as a survivor.
This is about you and keeping that in mind. Where
(02:56):
do you want to begin telling your story?
Speaker 2 (02:59):
I think the content is a good Okay, it begins.
I want you to know I do feel safe, and
I do get invited to do a lot of interviews
on this subject and I usually decline, but I feel
safe with you. Okay.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Well I appreciate that.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
So I guess there's a greater context that's cultural for me.
I'm a Cuban born immigrant and my heritage is African, Caribbean, Chinese,
and European. And of those first three cultures, you know, Black, Latin,
and Asian, it's really, as you know, against the status
(03:35):
quo to speak about sexual assault. Absolutely, yeah, because society,
the media is constantly denigrating the image of men of color,
particularly black men, and so we're deeply invested in protecting Yeah,
that rightfully so. But unfortunately in my case with Bill Cosby,
(03:58):
where that played a personal role, yes, all that came
to play, but it's not about race here. It's not
about protecting the black male image. It's about rape, and
rape crosses all sociocultural, all racial boundaries. I found that personally.
So that's the context from which I'm coming. That's really
difficult because unfortunately those Cosby fans and rape apologists who've
(04:26):
attacked me the most in public, sometimes in person with
raised fists, death threats, and rape threats have been black men.
And that's really painful. You know, I have six children
that I birthed in a ten year span, in five
of them are young black men. So that's really a
(04:47):
sad reality.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
With that context, because one of the first places I
go when I hear that is not only is rape
or sexual assault not allowable as a topic of discussion
for people who have your heritage, who have my heritage,
women of color aren't believed. Can you talk a little
bit about that.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
It's really like an added burden, very painful. One thing
that Bill Cosby did for me personally was to make me.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
I'm sorry, you take your time.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Both of my parents are mixed black people. Yeah, and
like a lot of Black Cubans, I grew up with
a deep seated, learned racial self hatred that you're not black,
you're mulata. And I'd go to school when the kids
called me nigger, and I'd come home and tell my parents,
(05:56):
and my mom would say, well, go tell them your mulatta,
and then they laugh at my face. My American. You know, classmates, dummy,
Mulata is a nigger. So I'd go back home to
my parents and I'd say, but they say, Mulata is
a nigger, and my mom would say, well maybe in America,
but in Cuba it's better than a nigger. So I
(06:19):
grew up with that stigma, you know, that pain, not understanding.
And I loved my black heritage. I gravitated towards it.
I knew I was black. My hair is naturally kinky.
And so when I met Bill Cosby, and he would
talk to me really academically because he knew that I
loved my black heritage. He knew that I was Cuban
and a Cuban immigrant. He knew that I identified as
(06:40):
being black and Latin, so he heralded that. So Bill
Cosby played a role in really making me feel proud
to be black, among so many other things that he
made me feel good about. Does that make any sense?
Speaker 1 (06:52):
It makes absolute sense. I wanted to ask you, growing
up and battling within you, his battle around racial identity
with in you, how did that shape your identity, not
only as a child, but ultimately as a woman. I
want to understand that peace first and then because I
fully understand the profundity and the power of somebody seeing
(07:15):
that part of you.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
Right.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
All we want, Lily, is to be seen right, right,
And he saw a part of you that you were
told not to see.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
That is a revelation, right when somebody does that for us,
and we will feel drawn to that, and it will
almost create an accelerated sense of trust.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
Yes it did.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
How do you think though grappling with that shaped you
as a human being to have had those conflicting and
actually brutalizing messages about race that you received.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Yeah, it's I guess what my therapist is called the
cognitive dissonance you.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
Cognitive dissonance is the tension we experience when things are inconsistent.
For example, we love someone and they hurt us. At
those times, we will often justify or try to find
the good in a situation, for example, they didn't mean it,
or even maybe I remembered it wrong. It is painful
(08:16):
to recognize that someone we trust is harming us, and
cognitive dissonance means that we will make those puzzle pieces
fit even when it hurts us.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
So whereas I'm born into a culture Afro Cuban culture.
We were immigrants living in Princeton Junction, New Jersey, trying
to assimilate and trying to hide our blackness. There was
all this shame right growing up. I mean like one
time my mom was braiding my hair and I was twelve.
I had no idea I had a natural afro because
(08:47):
she would always keep my hair braided. And my little
baby brother was crying. So she went to the room
and my hair was out in a big afro. The
doorbell rang and it was one of my blond neighbors
in Princeton Junction selling girls got cookies and opened the
door and she went wow. I was like what your hair.
I was like what, And I looked in the mirror
(09:08):
and there's this gigantic afro. That's my natural hair, a
gigantic afro. She's like, your hair, it's so beautiful. I
was like, just you know, throwing my afro around. My
mom came and she saw me. She said, cochina marana,
which in Spanish made you dirty, little pig, slapped my
face really hard. I told you not to open the door.
(09:29):
Oh the shame that our white neighbors would know that
I really am an afro so that's where I'm coming
into a trauma that's really deeply embedded. Where Bill Cosby
saw my blackness and elevated and said it was good.
Yes you're Latin, and yes you're black, and you're beautiful,
You're great. I see. He was my daughter. And then
(09:50):
Bill Cosby was not unsimilar to my dad in appearance.
You know, my dad's a black man, Bill Cosby's black.
My dad wore glasses. Bill Cosby were glasses. My dad
had moles on his face. Bill Cosby had moles on
his face. You know. I had suffered some really serious,
life threatening abuse from my dad in my childhood through
my early adulthood, and so I looked at Bill Cosby
(10:11):
as a replacement father figure. My father changed the last
twenty five years of his life and he became a
very loving father, very remorseful for the abuse that he
put me through when he was, you know, drunk.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
When we have these difficult relationships with parents growing up,
we do gravitate towards parental figures.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
Right.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
The challenge for you, though, was the parental figure figures
were also abusive. How did you first meet Bill Cosby?
Speaker 2 (10:40):
I was acting at Cornell University wanted to be on
The Cosby Show, you know, because I just it stood
for so much in America.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
What did it stand for for you?
Speaker 2 (10:52):
For me, it stood for excellence, black excellence. I mean,
that's an expression that's said a lot, but it stood
for black excellence. Showed the world that black people are
not any different than white people, that we have hopes
and aspirations and high achievements and vulnerabilities and problems like dyslexia.
(11:12):
And to see a couple where there were two black
professionals raising this family of five children in New York City.
When we moved to the United States, we moved to Brooklyn,
New York, so we lived in a brownstone So that
was all very familiar to me, that New York City life.
And so it just meant hope, it meant greatness, it
(11:32):
meant advancement, but really that black excellence. And that's what
The Cosby Show represented for me. And so ended up
doing a silent bit in a season in the fall
of nineteen eighty eight with Betty Carter, oh the same.
It was her guest role on The Cosby Show. And
what was interesting in retrospect is when I did that
(11:54):
little bit role, that She kept me in her dressing
room the whole week, and that when Bill Cosby came
into her room, she literally put her arm into my
arm and held me really tight. I did not understand
then why she was really holding me tightly, but she
was treating me as if I were her granddaughter or
something like that. And Bill Cosby came into the room
(12:14):
multiple occasions, and we spoke at that time about jazz
because she was a jazz singer, and about the influence
of Cuban jazz and New Orleans. Because you knew that
I was Cuban. I told him I was Cuban, and
it was just a really beautiful, again, intellectual talk about
jazz from a global perspective since I was Cuban.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
So is that where you met him?
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Actually the first time, my first time you met him,
it was twenty four.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
You're twenty four, okay. What's interesting to me is that
your draw to wanting to be on something like The
Cosby Show really came from a very thoughtful, intentional place.
So again, you were coming out of a top university.
You're clearly an academically gifted person. You were classically training
as an actor, and through sheer force of Will. You're like,
(12:59):
I'm going to be on that show, and you were
on that show, and so he meets you in this
dressing room and it's there that he's having conversations with
you about your cubanness, and so he's getting information about you.
You just think it's a conversation, but there was a
very different process for him because this felt like intel gathering,
like information gathering, and yet simultaneously you were having an
(13:23):
incredibly I mean, it's a notable experience that this older woman,
as you said, in these communities, in this case the
black community, you don't talk about this. She was doing something.
You know that it was almost like, how do I
protect one of our children in this community? But couldn't
say it right.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
But when Bill Cosby came into the room, I can
honestly say that I wasn't really like starstruck seeing him
because I was so just like basking in the comfort
of being with Betty Carter like I was her granddaughter,
and that was beautiful. But I do want to say
that having had that bit part on that show that
time and meeting the crew, it was predominantly black. You know,
(14:07):
I saw it for the first time black everything you know,
black makeup, black hair, black wardrobe, black stage designers, black
stage managers, black director. Some of the writers were black,
and it was so exciting to me. So I said,
I want to be back on this show, but I
want to come back in a speaking role, in a
principal role. So two years later, I saw an ad
(14:30):
in Backstage, which is the trade paper for actors, and
it said that they were looking for stand ins for
the Cosby Show. So I went and the line just
really wrapped around the whole block Kaufman Astoria Studios. And
when I finally got in, I had prepared a postcard
with my picture on it, and I wrote a little
note saying, thank you, mister Cosby. You know I was
on the show two years ago as a silent bit,
(14:53):
but I really want a principal speaking role on your show.
And I gave it to him, and I believe same
day when I got home, he called me. And so
that summer he spent hours a week mentoring me. And
that's where the what did you call it, investigation into
the relief?
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Intel gathering?
Speaker 2 (15:13):
The intel? Yeah, who I mean, it was as if
he were a news reporter. And so the first few
meetings he was just gathering information from me, and I
thought that he was just really genuinely interested in me.
So I would tell him everything, and he must have
asked me hundreds of questions, so he knew everything going in.
He knew the abuse that I suffered as a child
and young adult in my home, the domestic violence. He
(15:36):
knew my feelings of worthlessness. He knew that as a
member of the Abyssinian Baptist Church and all these things,
and that I didn't drink. I didn't consume alcohol because
my father would abuse me when he was drunk. So
he knew that because I told him. But I mean
so many things. He knew that I was a visual artist.
On some occasions when he invited me to the mentoring
(15:57):
he asked me to bring my artwork, and I would
bring my artwork and we'd have discussions because he told
me that he was an art collector, so we'd have
discussions about my paintings. I also, in high school and
in college, I played clarinet in the classical band, in
flute and saxophone in the jazz band. So he encouraged
me to take it back up again. So he helped
(16:19):
me to find out where I could get flute lessons,
and it was so exhilarating because my parents. My father
was also an academic. He was, you know, electrical engineer,
math professor. My siblings are PhDs and so academics and
art were like a very high vibration art and intellect family.
So it was really exciting to see another black man
(16:39):
like my dad who was a creative and an intellect.
It felt familiar.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Yeah, it felt familiar, but it also felt healthy. Yes, Lily,
I think that you know, the survivor's stories tend to
get very pathologized on the back, telling week vulnerable you
just wanted someone to pay attention to.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
That's not it at all.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
You came in in your full strength, fully possessed of
your blackness, which you've been denied of for so long,
wanting to explore that in a creative space. A mentoring
person is meeting you where you're at intellectually. That is
what is so insidious about what this person did to you,
is that they exploited your strengths. You're okay, take a minute.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
You know it's so many years ago, but it's like
it was yesterday.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
I know, I'm sure it is. I mean, I'm feeling
it here with you, and I just again so smart,
and that was being harnessed by someone and you didn't
know that at the time. You're going to going into
this as though it was a trusted interaction.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
Back when it happened, you know, Like the betrayal is
so deep. It happened in the early nineteen nineties, but
then by nineteen ninety two, I was so traumatized by
the betrayal that I actually ended up in the psych
word from the trauma. And then I didn't understand, like
part of the pain was like, oh, my god, he
(18:15):
loved me as a daughter. How could he do this
to me? But he loved me, you know, And so
I couldn't understand how someone who had professed to love
me so much as his daughter. Oh, he used to say,
you're one of my kids, Bernard. You know, I love
you like a daughter. You're one of my kids. And
so I didn't understand that. And it wasn't until you know,
fast forward two decades later that I started to understand
(18:37):
he never loved me. It was fake. It was phony,
you know, And that has helped me to process better
the betrayal, you know, that it wasn't really love.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
We will be right back with this conversation.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
But I thought it was paternal love.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Of you were being told it was paternal love. It
felt like paternal love. And I'm not convinced this person
is capable of love. I'm sorry. People say no, they
might love in parts of their lives. Maybe I'm hardcore
on this one, but no, that capacity, there is no
love there. And it was using the word doesn't make
(19:21):
it so. Was your mentoring all in person or all
in person?
Speaker 2 (19:27):
Yes? I thought then that he was obsessed with me
because he would call me so frequently, and several times
a week. He would have me come to his brownstone
in Manhattan where he lived, to mentor me and put
me through these exercises that were theatrical exercises. He also
had me come to this Cosby Show studios, and he
would mentor me at the Cosby Show as well. He
would mention me in his dressing room studio the Cosby Show.
(19:49):
He introduced me very early on to the entire crew
as someone who is a studied actor, you know, who's academic,
who's performing off Broadway, as someone who for whom he
was going to write a role, a main character, and
so I very quickly had meetings with the producers, with
(20:11):
the writers, with the directors, and that felt like also
very empowering. He gave me free reign of the studios
because he said that that when I act on the
Cosby Show, I had a huge responsibility to uphold because
it's the number one show in the world. And then
he also of course invited my family to come to
the studios with me. So he invited my dad, He
(20:32):
met my dad, and he invited my brother, my sister,
her boyfriend at the time, my cousin's friends. You know,
it made it all the more difficult that when he
did drug and sexually assaulted me, it made it the
more difficult for me to then tell my family who
met him and to whom he was really nice to them,
you know, and.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
He was a big name in the culture. I think
that we can't underplay this is that that was a
nefarious move no matter what, right because in essay, by
bringing your family into the fray, they get to meet
this sort of cultural icon that was all with the
goal of isolating you, because now you've lost a source
of support. Otherwise, it was still going to be very
(21:12):
difficult because he was so iconic. But then by adding
that other layer of look, I'm going to bring you in,
I'm going to give you the VIP treatment. They're getting
to meet this person. It's creating these bonds and then
fostering more isolation for you. It feels so calculated and
so intentional over such a protracted period of time. When
(21:32):
your family got invited at the time, were you suspecting
anything stranger?
Speaker 2 (21:37):
No, no, no. My dad, being a black Latin immigrant,
to see another black man in such a powerful position
meant so much to my dad. So when my dad
met Bill Cosby on the set, I'd never seen my
dad look at somebody like that with so much admiration
and gratitude. And Bill Cosby was telling my dad, you
know how wonderful your daughter is. I'm going to help
(21:59):
her become a star because she's such a great actor
and she works hard. He called my mom on the phone.
My parents were living in Spain, and so he called
my mom in Spain and assured my mother that he
would take care of me as if he were my father.
So even though my parents were living far away in Spain,
you know, they felt so good that he was taking
care of me.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
They must have been so proud of you. I mean,
what did it feel like to watch your family's pride
in you, watching your career blossoming on such a world
stage at that time.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Yeah, I guess it meant a lot. Because of the
abuse I suffered as a child, I was always looking
for their approval and nothing that I could do, whether
it was going to an Ivy League college, or being
first chair clarinet or first chair saxophone or being a
you know, award winning USGF gymnast, all of which I
was nothing. None of that would make my parents treat
(22:55):
me with the love and respect that I merited, as
any child would. So that achievement was like, look, Mommy
and Poppy, look I'm worthy. You know I'm worthy. My
acting career is not just a whim a hobby, so
I'm really serious about it. And look at this great
this great person telling me that I have talent. So
it meant so much.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
I bet it did, and it is. I mean, it
really must have been a moment of pride in and
at the time you weren't suspecting anything, so it was
just it was a big moment. And I think that
that's also so complicated about trauma right in that moment,
without knowing what you would know. It was a profound,
powerful moment for you in your life.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
Yeah. So there were three druggings and three sexual assaults,
and in the first one, the betrayal was so profound
that was an Atlantic city and just made absolutely no
sense that I was actually able to block it out,
I mean completely block out the memory in order to survive.
(23:57):
Blocked it out because there's no way this could happen.
Can I talk about a little bit about that one?
Speaker 1 (24:03):
Absolutely?
Speaker 2 (24:04):
I asked myself, like, why am I doing this interview
because it's important, you know, he had already mentioned me
for dozens of hours and weeks and means I had
no idea that it was grooming. I had no idea whatsoever.
So the first, the first incident happened, it wasn't a drugging,
but I guess it was what you call gaslighting. So
(24:25):
we were in his brownstone in Manhattan, and he was
putting me through these theater exercises that any actor does
when they're in acting schools, breathing. But he came up
from behind me and he was telling me to expand
my ribcage and how to breathe like when you breathe
in the diaphragm should go out and lift up your ribcage.
He was telling me to, you know, pull my head
(24:47):
up high. All of a sudden, he grabbed my breast
and I turned around really quickly, and I was like,
mister C. Because he had me call him mister C.
That's what I had to call him, mister C. Not
mister Cosby, definitely not Bill Cosby. So I turned around.
I said, mister C. I said, you grab my breast.
And I was shocked, and he said I didn't grab
(25:08):
your breast. He's said, yes, you grab my breast. He said, no,
I didn't. He said you grab my breast, and we
went back and forth a few times, No I didn't, Yes,
you did, and he was, I guess, such a good
actor that I was like. I actually ended up believing him,
and I started thinking, geez, that's really terrible of me.
He must have accidentally grabbed my rest. He must have
(25:30):
been meaning to grab my ripe cage. And that's what
he said, I grabbed your ribcage. So I was like, okay,
well that was probably an accident. You know, he probably
meant to grab my ribcage. He would never do that.
Shame on me for thinking that he would do that.
And then later he told me that I had to
meet with a producer, a white man who would further
(25:50):
my career, and that we had to go to the
Trump tash Mahal Hotel in Atlantic City. So he said
that the Trump taj Mahal Hotel was new, Michael Jackson
had just been there, and that's a place where celebrities
go to have meetings. And I remember telling my cousin
(26:11):
about it, and she's like, why do you want to go?
Why do you have to go to Atlantic City to
meet a producer? You live in New York. Cosby lives
in New York. This doesn't make no sense. Can I
come with you? And so I asked Bill Cosby, can
my cousin come with me? She lives in Princeton Junction
on the way. He's like no, no, no, no no.
So my cousin was telling me, I don't know, this
is fishy, don't go, don't go, and I'm like, I'm
going to go, you know. So Bill Cosby sent a
car to pick me up at my apartment and the
(26:33):
car took me whatever. It was a couple hours from
New York to New Jersey. And then when I got there, Yeah,
there was a producer with whom I met. We were
in a dining area. There were a lot of chandeliers,
and Bill Cosby came back and forth to the table
a couple of times. It was just me and the
producer talking and about my career and about the aspirations
that I had and everything that I was doing with
(26:55):
my career. And I had every reason to believe that
this man was going to advance my career as a producer,
and so thankful to Bill Cosby. And we had lobster,
and then we went up to a suite, a very
big sweet So when people criticize you for like being
in a hotel room, let me tell you that anytime
I've ever been in a hotel with Bill Cosby, which
(27:16):
was just twice, once in Vegas in Atlantic City, it
wasn't a hotel room. It was like, I'm talking a
suite bigger than my house, probably like five thousand square
big house, yeah, five thousand square feet, with a big
living room and kitchen and an office area. So we
went up to a suite. So I was sitting at
a table like a corner table with that man in
Bill Cosby. And by that time Bill Cosby had already
(27:38):
known that I don't drink alcohol. He knew that, and
so he gave me this drink and it was brown
and I tasted it and it tasted like alcohol. I
was like, drink alcohol. So he and the man had
a moment that they looked at each other like awkwardly,
but I wasn't suspecting anything. And then he came back
with another drink, but it was still brown, and this
(27:59):
time really sweet, like maybe he put something in it,
soda or something in it. And he was getting giggling.
He's like, drink, drink, drink, you know again, always to
drink to my success and you're gonna be great. And
he was literally pushing the glass up up my face
and I'm like, oh, okay, fine, you know, he's my daddy,
you know, helping me whatever, you know, have fun, drink.
(28:20):
And then very shortly thereafter, you know, I just started
getting groggy and the room was spinning, and I started
the inside my cheeks on the inside began salivating. And
I had had food poisoning just a couple of months prior,
with similar symptoms symptoms. So I thought, oh, was that
lobster downstairs full of food poisoning? Am I getting food poisoning?
(28:41):
That's what I thought. I had made no correlation whatsoever
with him, you know, drinking, I'm like, oh my god,
I have food poisoning again, and so like I have
to vomit, and still at the table, and I'm like
and just like it's coming out. I'd like, excuse me,
mister c And by the time I have to get
to the bathroom, I couldn't even walk, you know, and
he was holding me up, and I remember walking through
(29:01):
this hallway was kind of white. There's a door on
my left, the door aheaded me, a door to the right,
and I just like got into the bathroom really quickly.
Excuse me. I knew I was going to vomit, so
he tried to come in with me. I was like, no, no, no, no,
and I vomited all over. I remember there was a
telephone on the wall, which I thought it was strange,
a telephone by the toilet, and I'm just vomiting all
(29:23):
over my dress. And whenever I would see Bill Cosby,
you know, I wanted to impress that I was a
serious professional, so I dressed the part, and it was
a Sunday. I had just come from church, and so
I was dressed that part, you know, like a two piece,
nice dressed outfit. Vomited all over my dress. And then
the next memory I have, I must have passed out,
(29:44):
because then the next memory I have, I'm on a
couch and the couch was see this is the thing
is going in and out of consciousness. Like I have
like sensory memory, doctor Romaney, like sensory and colors, and
so I remember the couch was like hard. It wasn't
like a like a hard one. I think there were stripes.
I don't know. But then he's like taking off my
(30:06):
clothes and I'm still thinking, in my mind, doctor RAHMANI
that I vomited. How disgusting, how embarrassing I've vomited in
front of Bill Cosby. He's taking off my clothes to
help me to wash it. That's in my mind, right,
And then he starts taking off my stockings, and I'm
like getting really embarrassed. I'm like thinking, okay, and I'm
also drugged. I'm like, okay, stick off my stock as well. Okay,
(30:27):
that's okay. Vomit on my stocking. I remember feeling embarrassed.
Oh my gosh, I don't have underwear under my pantyhose
because it was built in pantyhose. So I started feeling
really embarrassed. Oh no, pass out. I don't remember the
next thing happening until now I'm waking up again. This
time I'm on the floor, and this time, this time
(30:51):
it's like a stick was inside of me. And I
say stick because I couldn't associate it with a penis.
I'm still detaching Bill Cosby to whatever horrible thing is
physically happening to me. So I feel there's a stick
inside of me. I'm on the ground, there's like a rug,
and I say, there must be a rug. I remember
the I remember a lot of patterns, like patterns on
(31:14):
the tiles in the suite, like patterns like geometric kind
of patterns. But this time, I remember the feeling of
carpet on my back, and I remember feeling like velcro
because as I was getting raped, my back was going
up and down. So I remember that feeling on my back,
and I remember the brownness of his skin right here
on my left. I remember his face like that, you know,
(31:39):
And then I pass out. Again, and then the next
memory I have, I'm in a bathroom of some sorts,
a porcelain or something chacuzi and it's light colored, like
probably white. It's cold on my back, I'm totally naked,
and there's water pouring on my chest. And that's how
I woke up, to water pouring on my chest, and
(31:59):
I remember, here, Bernard, you're okay. And I look to
the right and there's Bill Cosby's face in the door,
and I pass out again. And then the next memory,
it's dark but it's the morning, and he's literally drag
pulling my feet like this to the edge of the
bed and propping me up because I had told him
(32:19):
I had a performance that morning with Plays for a Living.
It was a theatrical company with which I worked that
performed at schools, rec centers, summer camps, halfway houses, programs
about drug addiction and things like that. I played a
teenager in it. I had to get to that performance,
and it was early in the morning, like nine or something.
(32:40):
But this was like a dusk when the sun is coming.
So he pulls me at the edge of bed. He's
putting on my clothes. I was still like a noodle.
I couldn't move my hands or anything, and I'm totally
confused what's going on? And he's telling me to hurry up,
you have to get to work putting on my thing.
And then the next memory I have, I'm being walked
like by Bill Cosby being a doorman outside to a car,
(33:03):
a car that he ordered for me, I guess, And
I get into the car and I'm again dizzy, you know,
like what confused, And the car driver was starstruck like
that's Bill Cosby, and he just for the whole two
and a half hour whatever was car right on the
New Jersey Turnpike. He kept asking me, this man about
(33:23):
Bill Cosby, are you gonna be on the show? And
all I kept thinking was what happened? What happened. I
looked down at my dress and there's the stain on
my skirt. I looked at my pantyhose and the ribbing
on the panty hose was all twisted, you know, like
I would never put my pantyhose ont that. I looked
underneath my thing and the crotch was inside out. I
was like a mess, And then thinking like my cousin
(33:46):
was right. I shouldn't have gone. What happened? I don't know?
Was this a nightmare? Was this? Am I crazy? What happened?
I still couldn't say that it was rape, Doctor Romeney,
I couldn't say it was rape. I'm like, some terrible
thing happened to me. I didn't know what it was
because I was still holding Bill Cosby in such wonderful esteem,
you know, having spent those dozens and dozens of hours
(34:08):
of him like a daughter and amoring my family to him.
I just because the abuse that I endured as a
child wasn't sexual. You know, it was physical, but it
wasn't sexual. So this was all different to me, A
father figure doing that to me. So I couldn't I
couldn't connect the two. And then when I got to
my apartment in New York City, I remember I had
(34:30):
to change. I remember what I put on. I mean,
I remember to the tea what I put on. And
I'm taking off my clothes and putting on this light
tan flannel shirt and some suspenders and going to performance.
I remember, like, how am I going to get my
lines out? I remember being on the subway, like where
am I? Like? I was trying so hard to be conscious,
like what I couldn't like. It was really hard for
me to just be conscious, like I don't like, am
(34:52):
I sick? What's going on in my head? Is it
food poisoning? Still I'm thinking I have food poisoning. It's
not making sense. And I just made a decision like
this didn't happen, Like.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
My conversation will continue after this break, and so.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
Like as aid, they progressed. Of course the drugs wore off,
but I was like, Okay, that was weird. That didn't happen. Okay,
that didn't happen. And I just blocked it out. And
I was able to do that through childhood, you know,
when something, yeah, like when my dad threw me through
the window or tied me in a chair in a
you know, in a dark basement, or knocked me unconscious
with the skateboard. I was able to block that out
so that I could move forward, you know, with my life,
(35:35):
because if you think about that stuff, then the alternative
is suicide. So I literally blocked it out so much
that weeks later when he flew me out to Las
Vegas to meet the producers of a Different World. That's
what he said, because as well as being on the
Cosby Show. He said that I was going to be
on a Different World, which he was a producer of,
(35:56):
and so I was really excited about that, and that
I would have to meet the directors, that the produce, us,
the casting people at the Hilton, the Las Vegas Hilting
and it was the same thing that meetings are conducted
in hotel suites because it's convenient for everybody to meet there,
and so that's where I was going to have my
audition for a Different World. Of course, when we got there,
(36:16):
the producers were never there. He had a bottle of
sparkling apple cider for me and a bottle of champagne,
which he said was for himself, and he told me
not to worry because even though the producers didn't show up,
you're still going to be on the show. Everything's going
to be all right. Let's drink to your success. And
so he gave me the he poured from the sparkling
(36:37):
apple cider my class and he gave it to me,
and the same thing, drink, drink, drink, push up, push
up the bottle up to my face to drink. And again,
now in my mind you when I'm here, I'm having
no memory of what happened in that. It's hard for
people to understand that, but you, as a therapist, I'd
like to hear you talk about that. You can understand.
I freaking blot the whole thing out of my head,
(36:58):
so I had no memory of at that point of
Atlantic City, and I'm sitting here and now I'm getting
dizzy again. But what do I think this time? He
gave me the wrong glass. So I'm like, mister c
you gave me the wrong glass. I told you I
don't drink alcohol, and so he made me chuck it
so quickly, so I'm thinking, my mind, now, oh my god,
he accidentally gave me a whole glass of champagne. I'm
getting drunk, so I start running away from him because
(37:21):
I'm like, oh, help me, stay awake. I'm starting to
pass out. We're running around the table and then all
of a sudden, boom, I fall boom, and my left
ribcage hits the corner of a coffee table, which cuts
me and bruises me. My head goes banging on the floor,
and I'm like, oh my god, how embarrassing. I got
drunk in front of Bill Cosby. He's tickling me on
(37:42):
the ground and I don't know why he's stickling, but
he was tickling me. And then my next memory is
I'm on a bed somewhere it's dark, and he's raping me,
I mean full blown. And then I pass out and
he did ejaculate on my belly. I remember that I
was screaming no. I was going in it out of consciousness.
I remember screaming, no, stop. You know I'm not on
(38:04):
the pill. What are you doing. It was really clear
now that Bill Cosby is raping me. And then after
he ejaculated on my abdomen, he plopped himself and whispered
in my ear, Damn, Bernard, You're so strong. You're so strong, Bernard, Damn.
And I think that's because I was a USGF gymnast.
(38:24):
I did karate. I was strong. I tried to the
best of my ability to push him off during the
rape when I was screaming no. At one point he
took his hand and he covered my mouth, and I
remember there's a lot of saliva on my mouth. I
remember the feeling of his fingers on my mouth as
he was like saying, shut up, Bernard, shut up. And
I was trying to scream and then he took the
pillow and he pushed it into my face. And because
(38:49):
I was incapacitated, my arms were they felt heavy like
lead and I couldn't move them rubber like like I
was paralyzed. And so I thought at that moment when
he was pushing the pillow in my face to silence
my screams of no, I thought I was going to
die of suffocation. So consequently, right now I have difficulty
(39:12):
putting my heads on pillows because I wake up in
these panic attacks that I'm being suffocated and I can't breathe.
I literally can't breathe. And like in Atlantic City, this time,
this time he went to the bathroom. When he was
in the bathroom, there's a light coming in, so I
have difficulty when I see lights coming in through crack doors.
And then he came back with a wet towel and
(39:33):
he was like cleaning me and rubbing me all around
my thighs and down there. And then I must have
passed out and fall asleep. When I woke up, there
was my clothes neatly folded that he had put me
in some kind of a T shirt. I woke up
in a T shirt that wasn't mine, like some college
T shirt. And then my clothes were full of there
and a note with some money. Oh, in Atlantic City,
(39:55):
he gave me money too, He like shove money in
my hand before I left. And here he had money again,
like a couple hundred or few hundred bucks money, And
so that made me feel like shameful, like money, like
I'm not a prostitute. What the is this money thing?
And then but I couldn't forget that one, doctor Rameney,
because of the bruise and the cut on my ribcage.
(40:16):
I couldn't block that trauma. But I knew enough that
I couldn't be in the same room with that man
by myself. So I continued to go to the studios
because he had promised the role to me, because I
had met with the directors, the producers. There was talk,
but I never was in the room with him by
myself again until more than a year later, and he
(40:37):
called me and said, Okay, we wrote the role for you.
It's ready, but you have to come to my Brown's
done and talk to my agent. And I thought, ah,
daylight afternoon, nothing could happen. And so there, Yeah, he
drugged and sexually assaulted me that time. He didn't rape me.
He wasn't successful at raping me. And that's when I
made the first connection, because when I drank the sparkling
apple cider and I began getting dizzy, I was like, whoa,
(41:00):
Everything just flooded back into my memory. And that's when
I realized, Wow, you drugged me, And all the Atlantic
City memory came rushing back. You know, you drugged me
in Las Vegas. You know a year agoing in Las Vegas.
You drugged me a year and a half ago or
whatever it was in Atlantic City, and oh my god.
And I had a huge confrontation with him. I told
him I was going to go to the police. I
(41:21):
was going to go to the hospital and find out
what he put in my drink. And he told me.
We were yelling at each other in his brownstone. He
was telling me that the minute I go to the police,
that he would go to the police after me and
follow a police report against me for false accuisition and defamation.
He had also said that he would erase me and
blacklist me, tell all of Hollywood that I was a
slaught and a whore and slept my way to the top.
(41:42):
He also said he would erase me. He said he
would erase me, and that all it took is one
phone call. I interpreted that that he would kill me.
He didn't say the word kill, but to me, a
RaSE means you know, something exists and then you erase
it and it's not there anymore. So I feared for
my life and he literally, you know, pushed me down
the stairs. I had to catch a cab, and it
was horrific. Even trying to get myself from his Browns
(42:04):
onto the corner to catch a cab. I was stumbling
and tripping because I was drugged, and I remember holding
on to the lamp post and trying to wave down
a cab. When I got back to my apartment, my
boyfriend at the time was there, who had met Bill
Cosby before through me. We both confronted Bill Cosby on
the phone, and he reiterated the same kind of threats
to my boyfriend at the time, and we just like,
(42:25):
there's nothing we could do. He made it very clear
what he would do to us if we went public.
He made it very clear that no one would believe us,
and we just he silenced us both, you know, he
threatened us to silence and that was that.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
First of all, thank you for sharing that. It's not
easy to share. Yeah, something so interesting about your stories.
How many details you remember, right, the feeling of the carpet,
the stripes on the sofa, that's often used again survivors. Well,
you remembered all that. Why can't you remember this? Right?
But it's different, it's entirely different. Some of the work
(43:00):
comes from a researcher named doctor Jennifer Fried. When we're
betrayed in such a fundamental way, in this case, a
person who is a father figure to you, raping you
is such a profound betrayal that she talks about something
called betrayal blindness. We actually create a blindness because it's
almost impossible to conceive of those things together. One of
(43:21):
the things you said to me that stuck with me
is I just felt there was a stick inside of me. Right,
it's a distortion of what was happening, But it wasn't
being contextualized as a rape. That blindness of betrayal, So
we forget, but we don't really forget. It's a blindness.
It's not that we don't see it. We can't see it.
And then what happened in Vegas you fell, and you
(43:44):
incurred a different injury than in some ways the physiology
of that injury. Saying, wait a minute, this thing happened,
the memory starts to form out a little bit more.
But you also have to remember you were drugged, and
that's going to impair your memory process. To remember something,
we have to pay attention to it, and that attention
for you was disrupted. So there were two things happening.
(44:05):
Not only of someone giving you some sort of sedative
is going to impair memory, but then these other trauma
processes operating, so we don't form these memories correctly. So
you know Pavlov's dogs, right, It's all that. It's the
thing we call classical conditioning. The pillow, the light, the carpet,
the smell of the ciders all get paired. The shower
they get paired, and they get a power waste freeways.
(44:29):
All these things they get paired. And now you have
to deal with the cataclysm of the person who was
the father figure who has all the power, did this
horrible thing, and that is a catastrophe in our brain.
Next time on navigating narcissism. This was more than just
Bill Cosby. You felt the responsibility of your race. How
(44:51):
did you manage that?
Speaker 2 (44:52):
It's hard? It still is hard. Yeah, I get attacked still.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
Lily reveals the last time she saw Bill Cosby.
Speaker 2 (45:00):
So he starts yelling at me and in front of everybody,
because this ain't about me trying to fuck you, Bernard.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
I already hit that you ain't shit the trauma of
his trial, but it was also.
Speaker 2 (45:09):
Really scary being in that courtroom.
Speaker 1 (45:12):
The outrage over his release.
Speaker 2 (45:14):
That was also like a stab in the back. I
felt deeply.
Speaker 1 (45:18):
Betrayed her healing process.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
I don't think anyone has ever asked me that question.
Speaker 1 (45:22):
And the aftermath of suffering silently for twenty two years,
what was your life like after this?
Speaker 2 (45:29):
I was highly suicidal.
Speaker 1 (45:31):
Join us next week for part two of my conversation
with Lily
What happens when America's dad is revealed to be a perpetrator.
Actress Lily Bernard knows all too well. On this emotional
episode of Navigating Narcissism, Lily bravely opens up for the
very first time about the horrific abuse she endured at
the hands of Bill Cosby. When Lily first met Cosby
(00:23):
in nineteen eighty nine, she was just beginning her career. He,
on the other hand, was one of the most famous, respected,
and beloved men in the world. Since then, over sixty
women have accused him of sexually assaulting, drugging, and raping them.
In twenty eighteen, Cosby was convicted and went to prison,
(00:45):
before being released on a legal technicality less than three
years later. His crimes have been the focus of documentaries
and news articles, but the experiences of the survivors are
often glossed over. What did the grooming process look like?
How did enablers and systems psychologically conspire to allow him
(01:08):
to keep perpetrating for decades? Even more important, what happens
to the survivors for years afterward. While this is a
story of sexual assaults, abuse, and perpetration, it is frankly
also a straight up story of narcissistic abuse. This is
Lily's harrowing journey of surviving Bill Cosby, not just what happened,
(01:34):
but what has happened to her since and the reality
of her healing process. This podcast should not be used
as a substitute for medical or mental health advice. Individuals
are advised to seek independent medical advice, counseling, and or
therapy from a healthcare professional with respect to any medical condition,
(01:59):
mental health issue, or health inquiry, including matters discussed on
this podcast. This episode discusses abuse, which may be triggering
to some people. The views and opinions expressed are solely
those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast,
(02:22):
and do not represent the opinions of Red Table Talk productions,
iHeartMedia or their employees. Thank you so much for coming
being here.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Here's where I'd like to begin. I truly believe that
one of the most difficult things about being a trauma
survivor is that people want you to keep sharing the
story of the trauma. What I'd like to have happened
today is your story and your experience as a survivor.
This is about you and keeping that in mind. Where
(02:56):
do you want to begin telling your story?
Speaker 2 (02:59):
I think the content is a good Okay, it begins.
I want you to know I do feel safe, and
I do get invited to do a lot of interviews
on this subject and I usually decline, but I feel
safe with you. Okay.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Well I appreciate that.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
So I guess there's a greater context that's cultural for me.
I'm a Cuban born immigrant and my heritage is African, Caribbean, Chinese,
and European. And of those first three cultures, you know, Black, Latin,
and Asian, it's really, as you know, against the status
(03:35):
quo to speak about sexual assault. Absolutely, yeah, because society,
the media is constantly denigrating the image of men of color,
particularly black men, and so we're deeply invested in protecting Yeah,
that rightfully so. But unfortunately in my case with Bill Cosby,
(03:58):
where that played a personal role, yes, all that came
to play, but it's not about race here. It's not
about protecting the black male image. It's about rape, and
rape crosses all sociocultural, all racial boundaries. I found that personally.
So that's the context from which I'm coming. That's really
difficult because unfortunately those Cosby fans and rape apologists who've
(04:26):
attacked me the most in public, sometimes in person with
raised fists, death threats, and rape threats have been black men.
And that's really painful. You know, I have six children
that I birthed in a ten year span, in five
of them are young black men. So that's really a
(04:47):
sad reality.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
With that context, because one of the first places I
go when I hear that is not only is rape
or sexual assault not allowable as a topic of discussion
for people who have your heritage, who have my heritage,
women of color aren't believed. Can you talk a little
bit about that.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
It's really like an added burden, very painful. One thing
that Bill Cosby did for me personally was to make me.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
I'm sorry, you take your time.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Both of my parents are mixed black people. Yeah, and
like a lot of Black Cubans, I grew up with
a deep seated, learned racial self hatred that you're not black,
you're mulata. And I'd go to school when the kids
called me nigger, and I'd come home and tell my parents,
(05:56):
and my mom would say, well, go tell them your mulatta,
and then they laugh at my face. My American. You know, classmates, dummy,
Mulata is a nigger. So I'd go back home to
my parents and I'd say, but they say, Mulata is
a nigger, and my mom would say, well maybe in America,
but in Cuba it's better than a nigger. So I
(06:19):
grew up with that stigma, you know, that pain, not understanding.
And I loved my black heritage. I gravitated towards it.
I knew I was black. My hair is naturally kinky.
And so when I met Bill Cosby, and he would
talk to me really academically because he knew that I
loved my black heritage. He knew that I was Cuban
and a Cuban immigrant. He knew that I identified as
(06:40):
being black and Latin, so he heralded that. So Bill
Cosby played a role in really making me feel proud
to be black, among so many other things that he
made me feel good about. Does that make any sense?
Speaker 1 (06:52):
It makes absolute sense. I wanted to ask you, growing
up and battling within you, his battle around racial identity
with in you, how did that shape your identity, not
only as a child, but ultimately as a woman. I
want to understand that peace first and then because I
fully understand the profundity and the power of somebody seeing
(07:15):
that part of you.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
Right.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
All we want, Lily, is to be seen right, right,
And he saw a part of you that you were
told not to see.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
That is a revelation, right when somebody does that for us,
and we will feel drawn to that, and it will
almost create an accelerated sense of trust.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
Yes it did.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
How do you think though grappling with that shaped you
as a human being to have had those conflicting and
actually brutalizing messages about race that you received.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Yeah, it's I guess what my therapist is called the
cognitive dissonance you.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
Cognitive dissonance is the tension we experience when things are inconsistent.
For example, we love someone and they hurt us. At
those times, we will often justify or try to find
the good in a situation, for example, they didn't mean it,
or even maybe I remembered it wrong. It is painful
(08:16):
to recognize that someone we trust is harming us, and
cognitive dissonance means that we will make those puzzle pieces
fit even when it hurts us.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
So whereas I'm born into a culture Afro Cuban culture.
We were immigrants living in Princeton Junction, New Jersey, trying
to assimilate and trying to hide our blackness. There was
all this shame right growing up. I mean like one
time my mom was braiding my hair and I was twelve.
I had no idea I had a natural afro because
(08:47):
she would always keep my hair braided. And my little
baby brother was crying. So she went to the room
and my hair was out in a big afro. The
doorbell rang and it was one of my blond neighbors
in Princeton Junction selling girls got cookies and opened the
door and she went wow. I was like what your hair.
I was like what, And I looked in the mirror
(09:08):
and there's this gigantic afro. That's my natural hair, a
gigantic afro. She's like, your hair, it's so beautiful. I
was like, just you know, throwing my afro around. My
mom came and she saw me. She said, cochina marana,
which in Spanish made you dirty, little pig, slapped my
face really hard. I told you not to open the door.
(09:29):
Oh the shame that our white neighbors would know that
I really am an afro so that's where I'm coming
into a trauma that's really deeply embedded. Where Bill Cosby
saw my blackness and elevated and said it was good.
Yes you're Latin, and yes you're black, and you're beautiful,
You're great. I see. He was my daughter. And then
(09:50):
Bill Cosby was not unsimilar to my dad in appearance.
You know, my dad's a black man, Bill Cosby's black.
My dad wore glasses. Bill Cosby were glasses. My dad
had moles on his face. Bill Cosby had moles on
his face. You know. I had suffered some really serious,
life threatening abuse from my dad in my childhood through
my early adulthood, and so I looked at Bill Cosby
(10:11):
as a replacement father figure. My father changed the last
twenty five years of his life and he became a
very loving father, very remorseful for the abuse that he
put me through when he was, you know, drunk.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
When we have these difficult relationships with parents growing up,
we do gravitate towards parental figures.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
Right.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
The challenge for you, though, was the parental figure figures
were also abusive. How did you first meet Bill Cosby?
Speaker 2 (10:40):
I was acting at Cornell University wanted to be on
The Cosby Show, you know, because I just it stood
for so much in America.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
What did it stand for for you?
Speaker 2 (10:52):
For me, it stood for excellence, black excellence. I mean,
that's an expression that's said a lot, but it stood
for black excellence. Showed the world that black people are
not any different than white people, that we have hopes
and aspirations and high achievements and vulnerabilities and problems like dyslexia.
(11:12):
And to see a couple where there were two black
professionals raising this family of five children in New York City.
When we moved to the United States, we moved to Brooklyn,
New York, so we lived in a brownstone So that
was all very familiar to me, that New York City life.
And so it just meant hope, it meant greatness, it
(11:32):
meant advancement, but really that black excellence. And that's what
The Cosby Show represented for me. And so ended up
doing a silent bit in a season in the fall
of nineteen eighty eight with Betty Carter, oh the same.
It was her guest role on The Cosby Show. And
what was interesting in retrospect is when I did that
(11:54):
little bit role, that She kept me in her dressing
room the whole week, and that when Bill Cosby came
into her room, she literally put her arm into my
arm and held me really tight. I did not understand
then why she was really holding me tightly, but she
was treating me as if I were her granddaughter or
something like that. And Bill Cosby came into the room
(12:14):
multiple occasions, and we spoke at that time about jazz
because she was a jazz singer, and about the influence
of Cuban jazz and New Orleans. Because you knew that
I was Cuban. I told him I was Cuban, and
it was just a really beautiful, again, intellectual talk about
jazz from a global perspective since I was Cuban.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
So is that where you met him?
Speaker 2 (12:34):
Actually the first time, my first time you met him,
it was twenty four.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
You're twenty four, okay. What's interesting to me is that
your draw to wanting to be on something like The
Cosby Show really came from a very thoughtful, intentional place.
So again, you were coming out of a top university.
You're clearly an academically gifted person. You were classically training
as an actor, and through sheer force of Will. You're like,
(12:59):
I'm going to be on that show, and you were
on that show, and so he meets you in this
dressing room and it's there that he's having conversations with
you about your cubanness, and so he's getting information about you.
You just think it's a conversation, but there was a
very different process for him because this felt like intel gathering,
like information gathering, and yet simultaneously you were having an
(13:23):
incredibly I mean, it's a notable experience that this older woman,
as you said, in these communities, in this case the
black community, you don't talk about this. She was doing something.
You know that it was almost like, how do I
protect one of our children in this community? But couldn't
say it right.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
But when Bill Cosby came into the room, I can
honestly say that I wasn't really like starstruck seeing him
because I was so just like basking in the comfort
of being with Betty Carter like I was her granddaughter,
and that was beautiful. But I do want to say
that having had that bit part on that show that
time and meeting the crew, it was predominantly black. You know,
(14:07):
I saw it for the first time black everything you know,
black makeup, black hair, black wardrobe, black stage designers, black
stage managers, black director. Some of the writers were black,
and it was so exciting to me. So I said,
I want to be back on this show, but I
want to come back in a speaking role, in a
principal role. So two years later, I saw an ad
(14:30):
in Backstage, which is the trade paper for actors, and
it said that they were looking for stand ins for
the Cosby Show. So I went and the line just
really wrapped around the whole block Kaufman Astoria Studios. And
when I finally got in, I had prepared a postcard
with my picture on it, and I wrote a little
note saying, thank you, mister Cosby. You know I was
on the show two years ago as a silent bit,
(14:53):
but I really want a principal speaking role on your show.
And I gave it to him, and I believe same
day when I got home, he called me. And so
that summer he spent hours a week mentoring me. And
that's where the what did you call it, investigation into
the relief?
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Intel gathering?
Speaker 2 (15:13):
The intel? Yeah, who I mean, it was as if
he were a news reporter. And so the first few
meetings he was just gathering information from me, and I
thought that he was just really genuinely interested in me.
So I would tell him everything, and he must have
asked me hundreds of questions, so he knew everything going in.
He knew the abuse that I suffered as a child
and young adult in my home, the domestic violence. He
(15:36):
knew my feelings of worthlessness. He knew that as a
member of the Abyssinian Baptist Church and all these things,
and that I didn't drink. I didn't consume alcohol because
my father would abuse me when he was drunk. So
he knew that because I told him. But I mean
so many things. He knew that I was a visual artist.
On some occasions when he invited me to the mentoring
(15:57):
he asked me to bring my artwork, and I would
bring my artwork and we'd have discussions because he told
me that he was an art collector, so we'd have
discussions about my paintings. I also, in high school and
in college, I played clarinet in the classical band, in
flute and saxophone in the jazz band. So he encouraged
me to take it back up again. So he helped
(16:19):
me to find out where I could get flute lessons,
and it was so exhilarating because my parents. My father
was also an academic. He was, you know, electrical engineer,
math professor. My siblings are PhDs and so academics and
art were like a very high vibration art and intellect family.
So it was really exciting to see another black man
(16:39):
like my dad who was a creative and an intellect.
It felt familiar.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Yeah, it felt familiar, but it also felt healthy. Yes, Lily,
I think that you know, the survivor's stories tend to
get very pathologized on the back, telling week vulnerable you
just wanted someone to pay attention to.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
That's not it at all.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
You came in in your full strength, fully possessed of
your blackness, which you've been denied of for so long,
wanting to explore that in a creative space. A mentoring
person is meeting you where you're at intellectually. That is
what is so insidious about what this person did to you,
is that they exploited your strengths. You're okay, take a minute.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
You know it's so many years ago, but it's like
it was yesterday.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
I know, I'm sure it is. I mean, I'm feeling
it here with you, and I just again so smart,
and that was being harnessed by someone and you didn't
know that at the time. You're going to going into
this as though it was a trusted interaction.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
Back when it happened, you know, Like the betrayal is
so deep. It happened in the early nineteen nineties, but
then by nineteen ninety two, I was so traumatized by
the betrayal that I actually ended up in the psych
word from the trauma. And then I didn't understand, like
part of the pain was like, oh, my god, he
(18:15):
loved me as a daughter. How could he do this
to me? But he loved me, you know, And so
I couldn't understand how someone who had professed to love
me so much as his daughter. Oh, he used to say,
you're one of my kids, Bernard. You know, I love
you like a daughter. You're one of my kids. And
so I didn't understand that. And it wasn't until you know,
fast forward two decades later that I started to understand
(18:37):
he never loved me. It was fake. It was phony,
you know, And that has helped me to process better
the betrayal, you know, that it wasn't really love.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
We will be right back with this conversation.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
But I thought it was paternal love.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Of you were being told it was paternal love. It
felt like paternal love. And I'm not convinced this person
is capable of love. I'm sorry. People say no, they
might love in parts of their lives. Maybe I'm hardcore
on this one, but no, that capacity, there is no
love there. And it was using the word doesn't make
(19:21):
it so. Was your mentoring all in person or all
in person?
Speaker 2 (19:27):
Yes? I thought then that he was obsessed with me
because he would call me so frequently, and several times
a week. He would have me come to his brownstone
in Manhattan where he lived, to mentor me and put
me through these exercises that were theatrical exercises. He also
had me come to this Cosby Show studios, and he
would mentor me at the Cosby Show as well. He
would mention me in his dressing room studio the Cosby Show.
(19:49):
He introduced me very early on to the entire crew
as someone who is a studied actor, you know, who's academic,
who's performing off Broadway, as someone who for whom he
was going to write a role, a main character, and
so I very quickly had meetings with the producers, with
(20:11):
the writers, with the directors, and that felt like also
very empowering. He gave me free reign of the studios
because he said that that when I act on the
Cosby Show, I had a huge responsibility to uphold because
it's the number one show in the world. And then
he also of course invited my family to come to
the studios with me. So he invited my dad, He
(20:32):
met my dad, and he invited my brother, my sister,
her boyfriend at the time, my cousin's friends. You know,
it made it all the more difficult that when he
did drug and sexually assaulted me, it made it the
more difficult for me to then tell my family who
met him and to whom he was really nice to them,
you know, and.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
He was a big name in the culture. I think
that we can't underplay this is that that was a
nefarious move no matter what, right because in essay, by
bringing your family into the fray, they get to meet
this sort of cultural icon that was all with the
goal of isolating you, because now you've lost a source
of support. Otherwise, it was still going to be very
(21:12):
difficult because he was so iconic. But then by adding
that other layer of look, I'm going to bring you in,
I'm going to give you the VIP treatment. They're getting
to meet this person. It's creating these bonds and then
fostering more isolation for you. It feels so calculated and
so intentional over such a protracted period of time. When
(21:32):
your family got invited at the time, were you suspecting
anything stranger?
Speaker 2 (21:37):
No, no, no. My dad, being a black Latin immigrant,
to see another black man in such a powerful position
meant so much to my dad. So when my dad
met Bill Cosby on the set, I'd never seen my
dad look at somebody like that with so much admiration
and gratitude. And Bill Cosby was telling my dad, you
know how wonderful your daughter is. I'm going to help
(21:59):
her become a star because she's such a great actor
and she works hard. He called my mom on the phone.
My parents were living in Spain, and so he called
my mom in Spain and assured my mother that he
would take care of me as if he were my father.
So even though my parents were living far away in Spain,
you know, they felt so good that he was taking
care of me.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
They must have been so proud of you. I mean,
what did it feel like to watch your family's pride
in you, watching your career blossoming on such a world
stage at that time.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Yeah, I guess it meant a lot. Because of the
abuse I suffered as a child, I was always looking
for their approval and nothing that I could do, whether
it was going to an Ivy League college, or being
first chair clarinet or first chair saxophone or being a
you know, award winning USGF gymnast, all of which I
was nothing. None of that would make my parents treat
(22:55):
me with the love and respect that I merited, as
any child would. So that achievement was like, look, Mommy
and Poppy, look I'm worthy. You know I'm worthy. My
acting career is not just a whim a hobby, so
I'm really serious about it. And look at this great
this great person telling me that I have talent. So
it meant so much.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
I bet it did, and it is. I mean, it
really must have been a moment of pride in and
at the time you weren't suspecting anything, so it was
just it was a big moment. And I think that
that's also so complicated about trauma right in that moment,
without knowing what you would know. It was a profound,
powerful moment for you in your life.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
Yeah. So there were three druggings and three sexual assaults,
and in the first one, the betrayal was so profound
that was an Atlantic city and just made absolutely no
sense that I was actually able to block it out,
I mean completely block out the memory in order to survive.
(23:57):
Blocked it out because there's no way this could happen.
Can I talk about a little bit about that one?
Speaker 1 (24:03):
Absolutely?
Speaker 2 (24:04):
I asked myself, like, why am I doing this interview
because it's important, you know, he had already mentioned me
for dozens of hours and weeks and means I had
no idea that it was grooming. I had no idea whatsoever.
So the first, the first incident happened, it wasn't a drugging,
but I guess it was what you call gaslighting. So
(24:25):
we were in his brownstone in Manhattan, and he was
putting me through these theater exercises that any actor does
when they're in acting schools, breathing. But he came up
from behind me and he was telling me to expand
my ribcage and how to breathe like when you breathe
in the diaphragm should go out and lift up your ribcage.
He was telling me to, you know, pull my head
(24:47):
up high. All of a sudden, he grabbed my breast
and I turned around really quickly, and I was like,
mister C. Because he had me call him mister C.
That's what I had to call him, mister C. Not
mister Cosby, definitely not Bill Cosby. So I turned around.
I said, mister C. I said, you grab my breast.
And I was shocked, and he said I didn't grab
(25:08):
your breast. He's said, yes, you grab my breast. He said, no,
I didn't. He said you grab my breast, and we
went back and forth a few times, No I didn't, Yes,
you did, and he was, I guess, such a good
actor that I was like. I actually ended up believing him,
and I started thinking, geez, that's really terrible of me.
He must have accidentally grabbed my rest. He must have
(25:30):
been meaning to grab my ripe cage. And that's what
he said, I grabbed your ribcage. So I was like, okay,
well that was probably an accident. You know, he probably
meant to grab my ribcage. He would never do that.
Shame on me for thinking that he would do that.
And then later he told me that I had to
meet with a producer, a white man who would further
(25:50):
my career, and that we had to go to the
Trump tash Mahal Hotel in Atlantic City. So he said
that the Trump taj Mahal Hotel was new, Michael Jackson
had just been there, and that's a place where celebrities
go to have meetings. And I remember telling my cousin
(26:11):
about it, and she's like, why do you want to go?
Why do you have to go to Atlantic City to
meet a producer? You live in New York. Cosby lives
in New York. This doesn't make no sense. Can I
come with you? And so I asked Bill Cosby, can
my cousin come with me? She lives in Princeton Junction
on the way. He's like no, no, no, no no.
So my cousin was telling me, I don't know, this
is fishy, don't go, don't go, and I'm like, I'm
going to go, you know. So Bill Cosby sent a
car to pick me up at my apartment and the
(26:33):
car took me whatever. It was a couple hours from
New York to New Jersey. And then when I got there, Yeah,
there was a producer with whom I met. We were
in a dining area. There were a lot of chandeliers,
and Bill Cosby came back and forth to the table
a couple of times. It was just me and the
producer talking and about my career and about the aspirations
that I had and everything that I was doing with
(26:55):
my career. And I had every reason to believe that
this man was going to advance my career as a producer,
and so thankful to Bill Cosby. And we had lobster,
and then we went up to a suite, a very
big sweet So when people criticize you for like being
in a hotel room, let me tell you that anytime
I've ever been in a hotel with Bill Cosby, which
(27:16):
was just twice, once in Vegas in Atlantic City, it
wasn't a hotel room. It was like, I'm talking a
suite bigger than my house, probably like five thousand square
big house, yeah, five thousand square feet, with a big
living room and kitchen and an office area. So we
went up to a suite. So I was sitting at
a table like a corner table with that man in
Bill Cosby. And by that time Bill Cosby had already
(27:38):
known that I don't drink alcohol. He knew that, and
so he gave me this drink and it was brown
and I tasted it and it tasted like alcohol. I
was like, drink alcohol. So he and the man had
a moment that they looked at each other like awkwardly,
but I wasn't suspecting anything. And then he came back
with another drink, but it was still brown, and this
(27:59):
time really sweet, like maybe he put something in it,
soda or something in it. And he was getting giggling.
He's like, drink, drink, drink, you know again, always to
drink to my success and you're gonna be great. And
he was literally pushing the glass up up my face
and I'm like, oh, okay, fine, you know, he's my daddy,
you know, helping me whatever, you know, have fun, drink.
(28:20):
And then very shortly thereafter, you know, I just started
getting groggy and the room was spinning, and I started
the inside my cheeks on the inside began salivating. And
I had had food poisoning just a couple of months prior,
with similar symptoms symptoms. So I thought, oh, was that
lobster downstairs full of food poisoning? Am I getting food poisoning?
(28:41):
That's what I thought. I had made no correlation whatsoever
with him, you know, drinking, I'm like, oh my god,
I have food poisoning again, and so like I have
to vomit, and still at the table, and I'm like
and just like it's coming out. I'd like, excuse me,
mister c And by the time I have to get
to the bathroom, I couldn't even walk, you know, and
he was holding me up, and I remember walking through
(29:01):
this hallway was kind of white. There's a door on
my left, the door aheaded me, a door to the right,
and I just like got into the bathroom really quickly.
Excuse me. I knew I was going to vomit, so
he tried to come in with me. I was like, no, no, no, no,
and I vomited all over. I remember there was a
telephone on the wall, which I thought it was strange,
a telephone by the toilet, and I'm just vomiting all
(29:23):
over my dress. And whenever I would see Bill Cosby,
you know, I wanted to impress that I was a
serious professional, so I dressed the part, and it was
a Sunday. I had just come from church, and so
I was dressed that part, you know, like a two piece,
nice dressed outfit. Vomited all over my dress. And then
the next memory I have, I must have passed out,
(29:44):
because then the next memory I have, I'm on a
couch and the couch was see this is the thing
is going in and out of consciousness. Like I have
like sensory memory, doctor Romaney, like sensory and colors, and
so I remember the couch was like hard. It wasn't
like a like a hard one. I think there were stripes.
I don't know. But then he's like taking off my
(30:06):
clothes and I'm still thinking, in my mind, doctor RAHMANI
that I vomited. How disgusting, how embarrassing I've vomited in
front of Bill Cosby. He's taking off my clothes to
help me to wash it. That's in my mind, right,
And then he starts taking off my stockings, and I'm
like getting really embarrassed. I'm like thinking, okay, and I'm
also drugged. I'm like, okay, stick off my stock as well. Okay,
(30:27):
that's okay. Vomit on my stocking. I remember feeling embarrassed.
Oh my gosh, I don't have underwear under my pantyhose
because it was built in pantyhose. So I started feeling
really embarrassed. Oh no, pass out. I don't remember the
next thing happening until now I'm waking up again. This
time I'm on the floor, and this time, this time
(30:51):
it's like a stick was inside of me. And I
say stick because I couldn't associate it with a penis.
I'm still detaching Bill Cosby to whatever horrible thing is
physically happening to me. So I feel there's a stick
inside of me. I'm on the ground, there's like a rug,
and I say, there must be a rug. I remember
the I remember a lot of patterns, like patterns on
(31:14):
the tiles in the suite, like patterns like geometric kind
of patterns. But this time, I remember the feeling of
carpet on my back, and I remember feeling like velcro
because as I was getting raped, my back was going
up and down. So I remember that feeling on my back,
and I remember the brownness of his skin right here
on my left. I remember his face like that, you know,
(31:39):
And then I pass out. Again, and then the next
memory I have, I'm in a bathroom of some sorts,
a porcelain or something chacuzi and it's light colored, like
probably white. It's cold on my back, I'm totally naked,
and there's water pouring on my chest. And that's how
I woke up, to water pouring on my chest, and
(31:59):
I remember, here, Bernard, you're okay. And I look to
the right and there's Bill Cosby's face in the door,
and I pass out again. And then the next memory,
it's dark but it's the morning, and he's literally drag
pulling my feet like this to the edge of the
bed and propping me up because I had told him
(32:19):
I had a performance that morning with Plays for a Living.
It was a theatrical company with which I worked that
performed at schools, rec centers, summer camps, halfway houses, programs
about drug addiction and things like that. I played a
teenager in it. I had to get to that performance,
and it was early in the morning, like nine or something.
(32:40):
But this was like a dusk when the sun is coming.
So he pulls me at the edge of bed. He's
putting on my clothes. I was still like a noodle.
I couldn't move my hands or anything, and I'm totally
confused what's going on? And he's telling me to hurry up,
you have to get to work putting on my thing.
And then the next memory I have, I'm being walked
like by Bill Cosby being a doorman outside to a car,
(33:03):
a car that he ordered for me, I guess, And
I get into the car and I'm again dizzy, you know,
like what confused, And the car driver was starstruck like
that's Bill Cosby, and he just for the whole two
and a half hour whatever was car right on the
New Jersey Turnpike. He kept asking me, this man about
(33:23):
Bill Cosby, are you gonna be on the show? And
all I kept thinking was what happened? What happened. I
looked down at my dress and there's the stain on
my skirt. I looked at my pantyhose and the ribbing
on the panty hose was all twisted, you know, like
I would never put my pantyhose ont that. I looked
underneath my thing and the crotch was inside out. I
was like a mess, And then thinking like my cousin
(33:46):
was right. I shouldn't have gone. What happened? I don't know?
Was this a nightmare? Was this? Am I crazy? What happened?
I still couldn't say that it was rape, Doctor Romeney,
I couldn't say it was rape. I'm like, some terrible
thing happened to me. I didn't know what it was
because I was still holding Bill Cosby in such wonderful esteem,
you know, having spent those dozens and dozens of hours
(34:08):
of him like a daughter and amoring my family to him.
I just because the abuse that I endured as a
child wasn't sexual. You know, it was physical, but it
wasn't sexual. So this was all different to me, A
father figure doing that to me. So I couldn't I
couldn't connect the two. And then when I got to
my apartment in New York City, I remember I had
(34:30):
to change. I remember what I put on. I mean,
I remember to the tea what I put on. And
I'm taking off my clothes and putting on this light
tan flannel shirt and some suspenders and going to performance.
I remember, like, how am I going to get my
lines out? I remember being on the subway, like where
am I? Like? I was trying so hard to be conscious,
like what I couldn't like. It was really hard for
me to just be conscious, like I don't like, am
(34:52):
I sick? What's going on in my head? Is it
food poisoning? Still I'm thinking I have food poisoning. It's
not making sense. And I just made a decision like
this didn't happen, Like.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
My conversation will continue after this break, and so.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
Like as aid, they progressed. Of course the drugs wore off,
but I was like, Okay, that was weird. That didn't happen. Okay,
that didn't happen. And I just blocked it out. And
I was able to do that through childhood, you know,
when something, yeah, like when my dad threw me through
the window or tied me in a chair in a
you know, in a dark basement, or knocked me unconscious
with the skateboard. I was able to block that out
so that I could move forward, you know, with my life,
(35:35):
because if you think about that stuff, then the alternative
is suicide. So I literally blocked it out so much
that weeks later when he flew me out to Las
Vegas to meet the producers of a Different World. That's
what he said, because as well as being on the
Cosby Show. He said that I was going to be
on a Different World, which he was a producer of,
(35:56):
and so I was really excited about that, and that
I would have to meet the directors, that the produce, us,
the casting people at the Hilton, the Las Vegas Hilting
and it was the same thing that meetings are conducted
in hotel suites because it's convenient for everybody to meet there,
and so that's where I was going to have my
audition for a Different World. Of course, when we got there,
(36:16):
the producers were never there. He had a bottle of
sparkling apple cider for me and a bottle of champagne,
which he said was for himself, and he told me
not to worry because even though the producers didn't show up,
you're still going to be on the show. Everything's going
to be all right. Let's drink to your success. And
so he gave me the he poured from the sparkling
(36:37):
apple cider my class and he gave it to me,
and the same thing, drink, drink, drink, push up, push
up the bottle up to my face to drink. And again,
now in my mind you when I'm here, I'm having
no memory of what happened in that. It's hard for
people to understand that, but you, as a therapist, I'd
like to hear you talk about that. You can understand.
I freaking blot the whole thing out of my head,
(36:58):
so I had no memory of at that point of
Atlantic City, and I'm sitting here and now I'm getting
dizzy again. But what do I think this time? He
gave me the wrong glass. So I'm like, mister c
you gave me the wrong glass. I told you I
don't drink alcohol, and so he made me chuck it
so quickly, so I'm thinking, my mind, now, oh my god,
he accidentally gave me a whole glass of champagne. I'm
getting drunk, so I start running away from him because
(37:21):
I'm like, oh, help me, stay awake. I'm starting to
pass out. We're running around the table and then all
of a sudden, boom, I fall boom, and my left
ribcage hits the corner of a coffee table, which cuts
me and bruises me. My head goes banging on the floor,
and I'm like, oh my god, how embarrassing. I got
drunk in front of Bill Cosby. He's tickling me on
(37:42):
the ground and I don't know why he's stickling, but
he was tickling me. And then my next memory is
I'm on a bed somewhere it's dark, and he's raping me,
I mean full blown. And then I pass out and
he did ejaculate on my belly. I remember that I
was screaming no. I was going in it out of consciousness.
I remember screaming, no, stop. You know I'm not on
(38:04):
the pill. What are you doing. It was really clear
now that Bill Cosby is raping me. And then after
he ejaculated on my abdomen, he plopped himself and whispered
in my ear, Damn, Bernard, You're so strong. You're so strong, Bernard, Damn.
And I think that's because I was a USGF gymnast.
(38:24):
I did karate. I was strong. I tried to the
best of my ability to push him off during the
rape when I was screaming no. At one point he
took his hand and he covered my mouth, and I
remember there's a lot of saliva on my mouth. I
remember the feeling of his fingers on my mouth as
he was like saying, shut up, Bernard, shut up. And
I was trying to scream and then he took the
pillow and he pushed it into my face. And because
(38:49):
I was incapacitated, my arms were they felt heavy like
lead and I couldn't move them rubber like like I
was paralyzed. And so I thought at that moment when
he was pushing the pillow in my face to silence
my screams of no, I thought I was going to
die of suffocation. So consequently, right now I have difficulty
(39:12):
putting my heads on pillows because I wake up in
these panic attacks that I'm being suffocated and I can't breathe.
I literally can't breathe. And like in Atlantic City, this time,
this time he went to the bathroom. When he was
in the bathroom, there's a light coming in, so I
have difficulty when I see lights coming in through crack doors.
And then he came back with a wet towel and
(39:33):
he was like cleaning me and rubbing me all around
my thighs and down there. And then I must have
passed out and fall asleep. When I woke up, there
was my clothes neatly folded that he had put me
in some kind of a T shirt. I woke up
in a T shirt that wasn't mine, like some college
T shirt. And then my clothes were full of there
and a note with some money. Oh, in Atlantic City,
(39:55):
he gave me money too, He like shove money in
my hand before I left. And here he had money again,
like a couple hundred or few hundred bucks money, And
so that made me feel like shameful, like money, like
I'm not a prostitute. What the is this money thing?
And then but I couldn't forget that one, doctor Rameney,
because of the bruise and the cut on my ribcage.
(40:16):
I couldn't block that trauma. But I knew enough that
I couldn't be in the same room with that man
by myself. So I continued to go to the studios
because he had promised the role to me, because I
had met with the directors, the producers. There was talk,
but I never was in the room with him by
myself again until more than a year later, and he
(40:37):
called me and said, Okay, we wrote the role for you.
It's ready, but you have to come to my Brown's
done and talk to my agent. And I thought, ah,
daylight afternoon, nothing could happen. And so there, Yeah, he
drugged and sexually assaulted me that time. He didn't rape me.
He wasn't successful at raping me. And that's when I
made the first connection, because when I drank the sparkling
apple cider and I began getting dizzy, I was like, whoa,
(41:00):
Everything just flooded back into my memory. And that's when
I realized, Wow, you drugged me, And all the Atlantic
City memory came rushing back. You know, you drugged me
in Las Vegas. You know a year agoing in Las Vegas.
You drugged me a year and a half ago or
whatever it was in Atlantic City, and oh my god.
And I had a huge confrontation with him. I told
him I was going to go to the police. I
(41:21):
was going to go to the hospital and find out
what he put in my drink. And he told me.
We were yelling at each other in his brownstone. He
was telling me that the minute I go to the police,
that he would go to the police after me and
follow a police report against me for false accuisition and defamation.
He had also said that he would erase me and
blacklist me, tell all of Hollywood that I was a
slaught and a whore and slept my way to the top.
(41:42):
He also said he would erase me. He said he
would erase me, and that all it took is one
phone call. I interpreted that that he would kill me.
He didn't say the word kill, but to me, a
RaSE means you know, something exists and then you erase
it and it's not there anymore. So I feared for
my life and he literally, you know, pushed me down
the stairs. I had to catch a cab, and it
was horrific. Even trying to get myself from his Browns
(42:04):
onto the corner to catch a cab. I was stumbling
and tripping because I was drugged, and I remember holding
on to the lamp post and trying to wave down
a cab. When I got back to my apartment, my
boyfriend at the time was there, who had met Bill
Cosby before through me. We both confronted Bill Cosby on
the phone, and he reiterated the same kind of threats
to my boyfriend at the time, and we just like,
(42:25):
there's nothing we could do. He made it very clear
what he would do to us if we went public.
He made it very clear that no one would believe us,
and we just he silenced us both, you know, he
threatened us to silence and that was that.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
First of all, thank you for sharing that. It's not
easy to share. Yeah, something so interesting about your stories.
How many details you remember, right, the feeling of the carpet,
the stripes on the sofa, that's often used again survivors. Well,
you remembered all that. Why can't you remember this? Right?
But it's different, it's entirely different. Some of the work
(43:00):
comes from a researcher named doctor Jennifer Fried. When we're
betrayed in such a fundamental way, in this case, a
person who is a father figure to you, raping you
is such a profound betrayal that she talks about something
called betrayal blindness. We actually create a blindness because it's
almost impossible to conceive of those things together. One of
(43:21):
the things you said to me that stuck with me
is I just felt there was a stick inside of me. Right,
it's a distortion of what was happening, But it wasn't
being contextualized as a rape. That blindness of betrayal, So
we forget, but we don't really forget. It's a blindness.
It's not that we don't see it. We can't see it.
And then what happened in Vegas you fell, and you
(43:44):
incurred a different injury than in some ways the physiology
of that injury. Saying, wait a minute, this thing happened,
the memory starts to form out a little bit more.
But you also have to remember you were drugged, and
that's going to impair your memory process. To remember something,
we have to pay attention to it, and that attention
for you was disrupted. So there were two things happening.
(44:05):
Not only of someone giving you some sort of sedative
is going to impair memory, but then these other trauma
processes operating, so we don't form these memories correctly. So
you know Pavlov's dogs, right, It's all that. It's the
thing we call classical conditioning. The pillow, the light, the carpet,
the smell of the ciders all get paired. The shower
they get paired, and they get a power waste freeways.
(44:29):
All these things they get paired. And now you have
to deal with the cataclysm of the person who was
the father figure who has all the power, did this
horrible thing, and that is a catastrophe in our brain.
Next time on navigating narcissism. This was more than just
Bill Cosby. You felt the responsibility of your race. How
(44:51):
did you manage that?
Speaker 2 (44:52):
It's hard? It still is hard. Yeah, I get attacked still.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
Lily reveals the last time she saw Bill Cosby.
Speaker 2 (45:00):
So he starts yelling at me and in front of everybody,
because this ain't about me trying to fuck you, Bernard.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
I already hit that you ain't shit the trauma of
his trial, but it was also.
Speaker 2 (45:09):
Really scary being in that courtroom.
Speaker 1 (45:12):
The outrage over his release.
Speaker 2 (45:14):
That was also like a stab in the back. I
felt deeply.
Speaker 1 (45:18):
Betrayed her healing process.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
I don't think anyone has ever asked me that question.
Speaker 1 (45:22):
And the aftermath of suffering silently for twenty two years,
what was your life like after this?
Speaker 2 (45:29):
I was highly suicidal.
Speaker 1 (45:31):
Join us next week for part two of my conversation
with Lily
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