On the heels of New York magazine’s chilling cover story about all the women who’ve accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault over the years, Janis Ian is coming forward with her own disturbing story about the man.
In a long Facebook post, embedded in full below, Ian details a time when she was 16 and performing her 1966 hit “Society’s Child” on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.
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Exhausted from all the press, she fell asleep on the lap of her female chaperone, a woman six or seven years older than her. After Ian had returned home, her manager called Ian and demanded to know what had happened at the taping, saying, “no one else on TV is willing to have you on.” Apparently Cosby had seen Ian asleep in her chaperone’s lap and told all the other shows she wasn’t “suitable family entertainment,” and that she “was probably a lesbian, and shouldn’t be on television.”
She begins her recollection: “Do I have a stake in this issue? Yes. Of course. Outside of being female, outside of knowing women aren’t ‘heard’ as loudly as men are heard, outside of firmly believing that if women were treated equally around the world, many if not all of the world’s problems would no longer exist — outside of all that… I have a personal stake.”
Read her full remarks below.
Thank you all for the response to my “Cosby memory”. Someone pointed out that by starting it with the New York Magazine…
Posted by Janis Ian on Tuesday, July 28, 2015