The Daily News is going on all out on the weird Bill Cosby news today. First, there was the icky story about Late Show staffers allegedly being forced to watch America’s Dad eat curry in the green room of the Ed Sullivan theater, now comes a story about an NBC staffer, Frank Scotti, who claims to have been Cosby’s fixer of sorts — the guy who guarded the star’s dressing room when young women paid him visits and also paid off said women to keep them quiet — during the glory days of The Cosby Show.
The 90-year-old Scotti said he decided to speak as the drumbeat of sexual abuse allegations against Cosby, 77, grew steadily louder. “I felt sorry for the women,” he told The News.
The Emmy-winning Cosby, NBC’s most bankable star at the time, used Scotti to deliver monthly payouts to eight different women in 1989-90 — including Shawn Thompson, whose daughter Autumn Jackson claimed the actor was her dad.
Cosby, while denying paternity, paid out more than $100,000 to Thompson over the years after their 1974 affair began. Scotti told The News that he believes Cosby was sleeping with all the women who received money.
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Scotti, who lives in Lakewood, N.J., saved copies of money orders from the era detailing his payouts to four of the Cosby women.
He recalled Cosby presenting him with “a satchel of money, all $100 bills,” and pressing Scotti to distribute the payments using money orders in his own name.
“I did a lot of crazy things for him,” recalled Scotti. “He was covering himself by having my name on it. It was a coverup. I realized it later.”
Scotti, who served as the facilities manager at the Brooklyn studio where The Cosby Show taped, also claims that Cosby had an arrangement with a sleazy modeling agency owner who regularly sent young girls over to meet him.
Scotti said Cosby also had an arrangement with a Manhattan modeling agency in which the owner would deliver young women to his dressing room. Some of the aspiring models were as young as 16, Scotti said.
“‘I want you to keep that one girl here,’ ” Scotti quoted Cosby as telling him. “ ‘I want to interview her for a part in the show.’”
The other models and the agency’s owner would quickly disappear, leaving Cosby’s pick alone with the comedian.
Go read the whole thing if you’d like your childhood ruined further.
