The women’s accounts are not necessarily new, but the magazine has brought them together and the photographs help distinguish one account from another as their stories bear startling similarities. Inside the pages of the magazine, each woman shared her individual experience.

Cosby, 78, has always denied the accusations and no charges have been filed against him, but the controversy has destroyed the positive public image he enjoyed for decades as one of America’s best-loved comics.

The final chair on the cover is vacant – a presumably symbolic gesture for any other victims who have yet to come forward.

In the years since women first said Bill Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted them and the months since the media started paying attention, it’s been hard to keep track of the comedian’s alleged victims. In the cover picture, the women are seated in rows with the date of the alleged assault written underneath them.

The ages of the women profiled in the story range from 44 to 88. In what the women describe as a “sorrowful sisterhood”, they speak of their life-long anguish.

Dickinson told the magazine when she was 28, she was invited by Cosby to Lake Tahoe, saying he had a possible acting opportunity for her. Many of them, according to New York, have said they know others who have been assaulted by the Cosby Show family man, and are choosing to still keep quiet about it.

The sure-to-be historical cover comes just over a week after The New York Times published court documents from a 2005 lawsuit filed by victim Andrea Constand, who was allegedly drugged and, subsequently, raped by Cosby.

New York Magazine’s website crashed Monday for about 12 hours before going back online.

“I felt like a prisoner”, said Barbara Bowman, who wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post about how hard it was to get anyone to believe her story.