Garcelle Beauvais’s new book, Love Me As I Am, is brimming with stories not only about her childhood and today, but her earliest years in the entertainment industry, when she was a model and first appearing in TV shows and movies, such as Coming to America, Miami Vice and, in 1984, The Cosby Show. She remembers encountering the latter show’s co-creator and star, Bill Cosby, who has since repeatedly been accused of sexually assaulting women, when she was 18.
“I felt like when I got to his brownstone that I wasn’t the only one there besides him. There was something eerie about not knowing if there’s anybody else in the house and then having, you know, him asking me if I wanna drink and I wasn’t a drinker. So it was all those things,” Beauvais told Bevy Smith this week on SiriusXM’s Bevelations. “And then something told me, ‘Get out of there.’ And that’s exactly what I did.”
Since 2014, dozens of women have accused Cosby of sexual assault, many of them after they had been drugged. The comedian was infamously convicted of assaulting Andrea Constand in 2004, although his conviction was overturned on a technicality in June.
Cosby has always maintained his innocence. His rep declined to comment for this story.
Although Beauvais didn’t talk about her brush with Cosby when most of the victims came forward, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, she was compelled to include it in her memoir.
“You know, my kids were little [back then] and my divorce [from Mike Nilon was going on], I didn’t wanna drag them into it. And I felt like I didn’t have anything concrete,” Beauvais said of her 14-year-old twin sons with Nilon, Jax and Jaid, and her now adult son Oliver with ex-husband Daniel Saunders. “It would’ve been me just piling on and I wouldn’t want people to think that, oh, I just wanted to be part of that and have my name out there. I included it in the book because it was a part, it was a part of listening to your gut.”
