Janice Doreen Dickinson (born February 15, 1955) is an American model, photographer, author and talent agent. Initially notable as a model, she has been described by herself and others as the first supermodel. One of the most successful models throughout the 1970s and 1980s, she expanded her profession to reality television in 2003 by judging for four cycles on America's Next Top Model. She subsequently opened her own modeling agency in 2005, which was documented in the reality-television series The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency (2006–08).

Biography

Dickinson has been married three times. Her former husbands are Ron Levy (1977–79), Simon Fields (1987–93) and Albert B. Gerston (1995–96; also recorded as Alan B. Gersten). With Fields she had a son, Nathan Ray Michael Fields (born May 5, 1987). She has a daughter, Savannah, by former boyfriend, Michael Birnbaum. In her books and in interviews, she has discussed her numerous sexual relationships with male and female celebrities. In 2012, she was engaged to marry Dr. Robert Gerner, a psychiatrist.

During an episode of the reality show The Surreal Life, Dickinson revealed in-depth information about the emotional abuse she endured as a child and teenager. She stated to her cast mates, "My father was a pedophile. He was a dark, angry guy. Being forced to have a pedophile for a father is probably the most horrible thing that can happen to a child, bar none." She said, "I survived a monster... 16 years I was forced to keep the secret... If I ever exposed my pedophile father, I would've been murdered. So you know what he did instead? He beat me on a daily basis." In an interview, Dickinson told British magazine Now, "When he was on the way to the hospital, I tossed his medication out of the car window and didn't tell the doctors. Maybe I wanted to kill the abuser?".

In November 2014, Dickinson told Entertainment Today that comedian Bill Cosby raped her in 1982. She said that she tried to write about the assault in her 2002 autobiography, but Cosby and his lawyers pressured her and her lawyers to remove the details. Dickinson became the most visible of a number of women who accused Cosby of committing sexual harassment and rape years before in multiple separate incidents. Criminal charges have not been filed against Cosby, although he is known to have settled out of court in confidential agreements with one woman making similar accusations in 2006.