Famed supermodel Beverly Johnson appeared on The View Monday, Dec. 15, where she discussed her recent Vanity Fair essay, which claims that Bill Cosby had allegedly drugged her in the mid-'80s.
The supermodel, now 62, recalled the incident to Whoopi Goldberg, who has been a prominent Cosby defender since the allegations involving more than 20 women resurfaced earlier this fall.
Johnson began by retelling the harrowing account, which she says went down at Cosby's NYC brownstone. Johnson claimed that Cosby had invited her over to help rehearse for his beloved family sitcom, The Cosby Show, which aired from 1984 to 1992.
Mirroring her previous account written for VF, Johnson said Cosby insisted she drink a cappuccino. "I really didn't want to argue with Bill Cosby," she reflected.
Upon the first sip, Johnson told the View women that the room "started to spin a little, right away." She then "took a another sip," and the drug hit her "like a moving train… At that moment, I knew, I had been drugged."
She said Cosby then made a move. "He motioned to me to come over like we were gonna rehearse the scene," Johnson recalled. "I went over, he put his hands on my waist. I put one hand on his shoulder to steady myself at this moment, and I cocked my head to one side and looked him dead in the eye and said, 'You're a mother f—er.'"
"And thank God you found that voice within you," Rosie O'Donnell noted to the stunning model. Johnson, the first black woman to land the cover of Vogue in 1974, nodded and said: "I kept saying it. Louder and louder and louder."
As Johnson wrote in her essay for Vanity Fair, the moment escalated when she started acting out. "I recall his seething anger at my tirade and then him grabbing me by my left arm hard and yanking all 110 pounds of me down a bunch of stairs," she wrote in VF. "I feared my neck was going to break with the force he was using to pull me down their stairs." Johnson wrote that Cosby then shoved her in a taxi to go home.
According to Johnson, it was almost dusk at that point, and people were slowly recognizing him. "After that I said, 'Did I just call Bill Cosby a 'motherf—er?'" she recalled of the blurry cab ride home. "That just shows you the culture of women and the violence towards women and us always blaming ourselves."
Johnson told the ladies on The View on Monday that the following day, she woke up unable to believe what had transpired. "The next thing I remember is waking up the next day and thinking 'Was that a dream or did that really happen?'" she confessed. "The drugs were there but I felt such a loss. It was like I lost a family member. I felt such a sense of disappointment. I was devastated. I didn't really know what happened. I was numb." Find out more details behind Johnson's allegations.
Johnson added that she came forward with her story to help other women in similar situations. "This is not about Mr. Cosby," she asserted. "He's just a lightning rod for conversations about violence against women… It's just indicative of the fact that I was the one who wasn't raped, I don't think, but who has had the experience that a lot of other women had. I'm coming forward just to tell the truth."
Meanwhile, Cosby, now 77, spoke to the New York Post on Sunday, Dec. 14, where he only addressed the claims with regards to the media. "Let me say this. I only expect the black media to uphold the standards of excellence in journalism and when you do that, you have to go in with a neutral mind," he told reporter Stacy Brown over the phone.
