Former Playboy model Victoria Valentino has filed a lawsuit against Bill Cosby accusing him of drugging and raping her in 1969, according to The Washington Post.
“It’s not about money, it’s about accountability,” Valentino, told the Post. “Rape steals something from you that cannot be repaired or restored.”
Valentino sued Cosby under a new California law that temporarily lifts the time limit placed on when civil sexual assault lawsuits can be filed after an alleged assault, the Post reported.
In the lawsuit, obtained by TMZ, Valentino said that she first met Cosby in his studio trailer after an audition while she was trying to break into Hollywood in 1969. She said that later, while treating her and a friend to dinner, he later gave her the women pills and told them to take them. Shortly after she took the pill, she said she began to struggle to stay awake.
She said he later sexually assaulted her as her friend was passed out on a couch in his office, according to TMZ.
A representative for Cosby, Andrew Wyatt, told TMZ that the media “needs to vet Victoria Valentino cautiously and carefully,” claiming that she’s changed her story several times over the years. Cosby has long denied allegations of sexual abuse.
Cosby, 85, has faced several lawsuits accusing him of drugging and raping women beginning in the 1960s. Last year, a civil jury in Los Angeles County determined that he sexually abused then 16-year-old Judy Huth at the Playboy Mansion in the 1970s and awarded her $500,000, The Los Angeles Times reported.
Authorities arrested Cosby in Pennsylvania in 2015, 11 years after authorities said he drugged and molested Andrea Constand in his suburban Philadelphia home. He was later convicted of three counts of aggravated indecent assault and sentenced to three to 10 years in state prison.
He served nearly three years of his sentence before his conviction was overturned in 2021, prompting his release.
The lawsuit in California follows suits by a half dozen other women in New York. The women, who sued under a New York law that temporarily lifted the statute of limitations for sexual abuse lawsuits, claimed that the actor and comedian sexually assaulted and abused them decades earlier, CNN reported.
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