35 Bill Cosby Victims Describe Sex Abuse To New York Magazine

There was the disoriented and drugged woman who said Bill Cosby put his forearm under her throat after she revealed to hotel staff she was 19 and staying with the superstar.

There was the woman who couldn’t form words as the star of “The Cosby Show” leered at her and her unconscious friend with “a very predatory look on his face,” according to a New York magazine article that publishes Monday.

And there was the woman who thought she was one of Cosby’s best friends — until she woke up naked after he plied her with medicine for a “headache.”

Those are the stunning stories of three of 35 women who told the magazine they were assaulted by the disgraced cultural icon once called “America’s Dad.”

They all agreed to be photographed for the article, powerfully illustrating Cosby’s alleged decades-long pattern of cold, calculating sexual assault.

Social status was not a factor in who became Cosby victims. Any woman who entered his orbit could potentially end up fading in and out of reality after he drugged them with powerful Quaaludes, the victims say.

Waitresses, Playboy bunnies, journalists and women at all levels of show business are among the women who charge Cosby took advantage of them.

They range in age from their early 20s to 80.

Cosby’s image as a wholesome, trustworthy man with a sure moral compass helped make them more vulnerable to his alleged trickery.

“I went into this thinking he was going to be my father. To wake up half-dressed and raped by the man that said he was going to love me like a father? That’s pretty sick,” Barbara Bowman, 48, said, of her encounters with Cosby in the 1980s.

She didn’t feel like she could tell anyone what he’d done to her.

“I felt like a prisoner; I felt I was kidnapped and hiding in plain sight. I could have walked down any street of Manhattan at any time and said, ‘I’m being raped and drugged by Bill Cosby,’ but who the hell would have believed me? Nobody, nobody.”

Cosby, 78, maintained in a 2005 deposition he used the Quaaludes only during consensual sex.

“I think that I’m a pretty decent reader of people and their emotions in these romantic sexual things,” he said.

He likened giving a woman a Quaalude to saying, “Have a drink.”

He is seeking sanctions against one of his accusers, Andrea Constand, in connection with the publication of parts of the deposition. The two had a confidential agreement as part of a settlement of their federal case in Pennsylvania.

His legal team did not respond to inquiries from New York magazine. Emails from the Daily News to two of his lawyers were also not returned.

“Cosby Show” writer Sammie Mays, 57, said an assault in 1987 derailed her life.

“When I see Jell-O pudding, it comes flooding back. Bill Cosby, that encounter, that one time, played a major factor in the direction my life took, toward the dark side,” Mays told the magazine.

The trauma of the alleged encounters is made all the more unavoidable because of Cosby’s stardom.

“People would mention a joke that he said: ‘Wasn’t that funny?’ And all the while, my stomach would just be churning,” Joan Tarshis, 67, said.

A total of 46 women have come forward to say they were assaulted by Cosby, according to the magazine. Many in the group say they’ve been contacted by others who have not yet spoken publicly.

“It was sort of like we were yodeling in a canyon and set off an avalanche,” Tarshis said.

Triggering that avalanche — a radical, rapid change in public opinion — took years.

Cosby’s accusers were previously portrayed as gold diggers and not taken seriously.

“You do know that’s (Hugh) Hefner’s best friend, right?’” Playboy bunny P.J. Masten recalled a supervisor saying after she told her boss about Cosby. “I said, ‘Yes.’ She says to me: ‘Nobody’s going to believe you. I suggest you shut your mouth.’”

There was additional pressure as well.

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