Cosby accuser, Toledo native steps forward

4/23/2019

Patte O'Connor outside her home in Sylvania Township.

THE BLADE/AMY E. VOIGT
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For years, it was her funny Bill Cosby story.

It happened in October, 1984. Patte O’Connor was 24 and recently out of graduate school at Bowling Green State University near her hometown of Toledo.

She was working as the assistant director of student activities at Clemson University in South Carolina, and comedian Bill Cosby was headlining a night of performances lined up for homecoming weekend.

“I was assigned to be his hostess for the day,” said Ms. O’Connor, now 60 and of Sylvania Township.

Cosby was hungry when she picked him up that afternoon, so they stopped at a local restaurant to grab burgers and Cokes and brought them to his hotel. He had time to kill before he was scheduled to arrive at the university’s auditorium, so they started talking.

“You know those people that you meet for the first time and you just start chatting and it feels like you’ve known them forever? It was totally that,” Ms. O’Connor said.

She remembers Cosby offered her wine from a gift basket university officials had placed in his room. Once the wine was gone, he offered a mix of coffee and Kahlua.

Looking back Ms. O’Connor realized Cosby wasn’t drinking with her, but at the time she felt comfortable with him. He was asking about her life and her career. They called her parents to say “hi” from the hotel phone. They were like two friends having fun.

“He went into his Bill Cosby persona where he kicked it up to being funny,” she said. “It was amusing.”

Ms. O’Connor had been up since about 4 a.m. that day and was exhausted. She remembers at one point Cosby asked her if she wanted to take a nap.

They lay down, and she remembers him asking, “Do you like back rubs or tummy rubs?”

He rubbed her back and then asked her to rub his stomach, she said. And then the man who a minute ago felt like a longtime friend, someone she could trust, kissed her on the mouth.

“That shocked me. It shocked me. I said ‘no’ immediately,” she said. “After the kiss, I blacked out.”

The next thing she remembers was the sharp ring of the hotel phone and the sound of the shower running. The room was dark, and she didn’t know where she was or what was going on.

She picked up the phone and her boss was screaming on the other end, upset because Cosby was late to the performance.

“I’ll never know what he really did, but I know it wasn’t good,” she said.

JANE DOE NO. 6

Twenty years later, Andrea Constand accused Cosby of drugging and sexually assaulting her when she was director of operations for Temple University’s women’s basketball program.

The district attorney in Pennsylvania’s Montgomery County declined to pursue Ms. Constand’s case criminally in 2005, but Ms. Constand filed a civil suit against Cosby.

For Ms. O’Connor, hearing Ms. Constand’s story was like a gut punch.

“It was then that I was like, ‘That wasn’t a funny story. That happened to me,’” Ms. O’Connor said. “That was all repressed for 20-plus years. It hit me so deeply. ... It changed everything in me.”

She called Ms. Constand’s attorney, sat for a deposition, and became Jane Doe No. 6.

She was one of 12 Jane Does referenced in the civil suit, all with similar stories of abuse, all unnamed, but all prepared to testify.

Representatives for Perry, Shore, Weisenberger and Zemlock, the Harrisburg, Pa., law firm representing Cosby, did not respond to a request for comment on Monday. Cosby has repeatedly denied the allegations of abuse levied by Ms. Constand and dozens of other women.

The identities of Jane Does No. 6, No. 8, and No. 9 have been unknown publicly until this week.

They told their stories to former Philadelphia Daily News reporter Nicole Weisensee Egan, who tracked them down for her book Chasing Cosby: The Downfall of America’s Dad. She has been covering the Cosby saga since 2005.

“I feel like a lot of this story has never been told, and there’s a lot of misinformation out there that has been promulgated by Cosby and his people,” Mrs. Egan said. “I’ve always been intrigued by the Jane Does.”

Ms. O’Connor, Denise Ferrari, and Virginia Bennett all agreed to let Mrs. Egan publish their names. Jane Doe No. 3 talked to her but still wants to remain private.

The book is out Tuesday, and for the first time Ms. O’Connor is ready for everyone to know her story.

“I hope that if I can help one person out there get the strength to say, ‘Something awful like that happened to me, too.’ And if that starts them on their journey to heal, then my work here is done,” she said.

Ms. Constand’s civil suit against Cosby was settled in 2006, but in the years since more than 60 women have accused him of abuse.

“Every time it came up, it’s just like it happened yesterday. All the feelings well up. All the anger, all the anguish, all the crap comes up,” Ms. O’Connor said.

In 2015, just weeks before the statute of limitations was up, Cosby was charged with drugging and sexually assaulting Ms. Constand in 2004. The criminal proceedings ended in a mistrial in 2017, but the second trial ended with a conviction.

In April, 2018, he was convicted of aggravated indecent assault, and in September, 2018, a judge designated Cosby, now 81, as a “sexually violent predator” and sentenced him to 3 to 10 years in prison.

“It’s long overdue,” Ms. O’Connor said.

‘WHAT HAPPENED TO PATTE?’

Ms. O’Connor has a photograph of her and Cosby taken that night at Clemson University. She doesn’t remember posing for it.

She was still out of it, she said, so much so that she doesn’t remember the police escorting her home or how she ended up passed out in the middle of the stairs inside her townhouse.

She does remember her boss confronting Cosby, demanding to know “What happened to Patte? Why is she like this?”

She also remembers Cosby mouthing the words “I’m sorry” before stepping onstage to thunderous applause.

Tom Misuraca, 67, remembers Ms. O’Connor calling him the next day. He’s a longtime friend from Ms. O’Connor’s days at BGSU who describes her as an outgoing, genuine person who cares about others.

“She was relatively upset both with what she believed happened to her as well as how she felt it might affect her job,” said Mr. Misuraca, who now lives in Pittsburgh.

He said that at 24, Ms. O’Connor had experience working with celebrities. She wasn’t one to get starstruck or turn into a fan girl. She was a professional.

He remembers their conversation vividly, and they’ve talked about her experience again and again throughout their nearly 40-year friendship.

“She said her clothes were disheveled, she had a terrible, terrible headache that was much, much worse than any hangover she had ever had, and she believed that she had been sexually assaulted,” Mr. Misuraca said.

He believed her then, and he believes her now.

“I’m extremely proud of her,” he said.

Over the years Ms. O’Connor has told a little more than a dozen friends. In the past few years she told her aunt and her brother, but did not tell her parents.

She didn’t want them to deal with the onslaught of attention and possible backlash she predicted would come with going public. Her father died in 2012, and her mother is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

The experience with Cosby itself changed her. It has made close, intimate relationships difficult. Keeping it secret or chalking it up as a funny story was hard on her, too.

“You feel like you don’t matter. You feel unimportant. You feel devalued,” she said. “It kind of wreaks havoc with your self-concept.”

Oregon resident Joy Andrews, 48, met Ms. O’Connor through work in the early 2000s. Ms. O’Connor is a captivating storyteller, and Ms. Andrews remembers hearing the funny Bill Cosby story.

“I could never see Bill Cosby after that without thinking, ‘That guy’s a creep,’” she said. “Although there were funny elements to it, it just didn’t sit right with me.”

When Cosby was charged with drugging and assaulting Ms. Constand, Ms. Andrews texted her friend: “What do you think really happened to you?”

“Watching her go from seeing that as the crazy or funny Cosby story to accepting the trauma of what probably happened to her ... it’s been hard to watch,” Ms. Andrews said. “There’s a lot of pain that she is trying to heal through feeling empowered with her story and helping other people.”

The day before Chasing Cosby was to publish, Ms. O’Connor cried on her couch in her Sylvania Township home. They were tears of joy, of liberation.

“I think I am finally coming into my own. And that feels — there’s no words to describe that. Because you finally figure out who you are,” she said. “You finally figure out your talents and gifts. You finally figure out your truth, and there’s nothing more empowering than that. Nothing.”

She is no longer Jane Doe No. 6.

She is Patte O’Connor.

Staff writer Lauren Lindstrom contributed to this report.