Tony Hogue banged furiously on the front door of Bill Cosby’s Upper East Side brownstone. Every so often he shouted out and kicked the door, calling the name of his friend, a 23-year-old woman who he believed was groggy, terrified, and possibly trapped inside, too dazed and confused to extricate herself.

“I just started kicking it and pounding it. I made quite a racket. I wanted to get in,” Hogue recalled, describing an incident that he says occurred around midnight in September 1984. Relying on his best recollection of events from thirty years ago, he says it happened about 20 minutes after the woman—designated in 2005 as a witness “Jane Doe 8” in a sexual-assault lawsuit against the cultural icon—phoned Hogue and pleaded with him to come and save her. (The women didn’t testify—the case was settled before trial.)

“She was crying. She was hysterical. She was whispering,” Hogue recalled in an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast. “She said, ‘Tony, you’ve got to come get me.’ And I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ And she said, ‘Tony, I’ve been in this room, I think on the second floor, and I’ve been here for a long time. I don’t think I’m even in my own clothes. I’m almost numb. I can’t stand up. I can’t see straight. My clothes are all disheveled.’