Hollywood exec joins Cosby accuser list

A former big-time Hollywood executive, with a powerful Hollywood name, has come forward to accuse Bill Cosby of drugging and raping her in 1969, joining more than two-dozen lesser-known women with similar stories.

It's the first time Cindra Ladd has spoken out, and the last, she says. She has no plans to sue. She doesn't want money. She's not calling a press conference or doing any interviews. She's just telling "the truth," she says.

Her story sounds all too familiar.

Ladd, a former film executive-turned-charity activist, and wife of producer Alan Ladd Jr., former president of Twentieth Century Fox and Chairman of MGM/UA , published a compelling essay in the Huffington Post Monday detailing what she says happened to her when she became friends with the married Cosby in New York in the late 1960s.

She was 21 and just getting started in the entertainment industry; he was 32 and an international star.

They made a date to see a movie one night, but she arrived at an apartment (he said it belonged to a friend) with a bad headache. He offered her a capsule to take. She says she kept asking him what it was, but that he would only say, "Don't you trust me?"

"Of course I did. This was Bill Cosby," Ladd wrote. She can barely remember what happened next.

"What I do recall, vividly and clearly, is waking up the next morning nude in the bed of his friend's apartment and seeing Cosby wearing a white terrycloth bathrobe and acting as if there was nothing unusual," she wrote. "It was obvious to me that he had had sex with me. I was horrified, embarrassed and ashamed. There was a mirror above the bed, which shocked me further."

She left quickly and cried all the way home. She never thought to go to the police; "date rape" was a concept that didn't exist then, she wrote.

"Other than my roommate, I did not discuss that night with anyone for 36 years," she wrote. She could never reconcile the image of "compassionate and honorable" Cosby with the man she said she encountered that night.

She went on to marry Ladd Jr., a film producer whose works include Blade Runner, The Right Stuff and Oscar-winning Braveheart and Chariots of Fire. She only told her husband about it nine years ago, when she was one of 13 women willing to testify in a lawsuit against Cosby by another accuser; that lawsuit was subsequently settled and no one testified.

"This is the first time I have chosen to speak out about that night," she wrote. "It is also the last time I intend to address it publicly. I have no plans to sue, I don't want or need money. I have no plans for a press conference or for doing any interviews."

So why come forward now? "The simple answer is that it's the right thing to do. The truth deserves to be known."

She and the other women who have accused Cosby in recent months say their encounters with Cosby occurred decades ago when rape prosecutions were much harsher on victims, who often were blamed for what they wore or what they did.

"When this happened to me, the idea of drugging someone and raping them was almost fantastical," Ladd wrote. "I no longer feel the shame that kept me silent. Yes, I could have told my story years ago, and in hindsight I probably should have. It's time now that my voice be added and to finally pull the curtain back from this dark moment in my life."

She says she has only run into Cosby once since the incident, when she was introduced to him by her husband.

"I was shaking, wondering if he would recognize me by my unusual first name," she concluded her essay. "His reaction spoke volumes. To Bill Cosby, I was just another stranger."

There has been no response yet from Cosby or his legal team. So far, he has denied all allegations of sexual assault, and he has not been charged with a crime.

Meanwhile, Cosby's personal bete noire, Judd Apatow, who's been keeping up a steady pace of attack tweets, sent out another one Monday, pointing to a passage in one of Cosby's books where he discusses Spanish fly, the supposed aphrodisiac.

His current tour registered another indefinite postponement, this one in Bakersfield, Calif., scheduled for Feb 12.

So far, the allegations against Cosby have had mixed effect: Some performances were protested either inside or outside the venues, some were cancelled, some postponed, and some have been standing-ovation successes.