From the article "Dickinson says that keeping the alleged sexual assault a secret for 32 years drove her to a life of hurting herself."
With her history of drug and alcohol abuse, it sounds like she was already well-practiced in the art of hurting herself before the alleged rape.
The encounter sounds like it was not helpful, however.
Predators size up and target the young and fearful or the morally weak. The victims will keep silent, or if vocal it becomes a case of who ya gonna believe, the upstanding Bill Cosby or that drunk fame-seeking floozy?
I observed very early on in life that a whole lot of people have two faces. The ones who showed me their "other side" perceived correctly that I would keep it to myself. They've got that whole plausible deniability schtick worked out in order to blame and heap more abuse on the victim.
It was only decades later that I could grasp the level of abuse, deception and manipulation inherent in these sociopathic personality types.
If these allegations are true, I suspect that a lot of these women just accepted the abuse as the price for being young, dumb and naive (starstruck, hoping for fame, or just too clueless to know to avoid certain situations).
Now that they are older, they *know* it was the fault of a powerful opportunist who was old enough to know exactly what he was doing.
Too bad Monica Lewinski is still stuck on stupid.