New York Times: Two Women Say Donald Trump Touched Them Inappropriately (by Megan Twohey and Michael Barbaro, October 12, 2016):
Donald J. Trump was emphatic in the second presidential debate: Yes, he had boasted about kissing women without permission and grabbing their genitals. But he had never actually done those things, he said.
“No,” he declared under questioning on Sunday evening, “I have not.”
At that moment, sitting at home in Manhattan, Jessica Leeds, 74, felt he was lying to her face. “I wanted to punch the screen,” she said in an interview in her apartment.
More than three decades ago, when she was a traveling businesswoman at a paper company, Ms. Leeds said, she sat beside Mr. Trump in the first-class cabin of a flight to New York. They had never met before.
About 45 minutes after takeoff, she recalled, Mr. Trump lifted the armrest and began to touch her.
According to Ms. Leeds, Mr. Trump grabbed her breasts and tried to put his hand up her skirt.
“He was like an octopus,” she said. “His hands were everywhere.”
She fled to the back of the plane. “It was an assault,” she said.
Ms. Leeds has told the story to at least four people close to her, who also spoke with The New York Times.
Mr. Trump’s claim that his crude words had never turned into actions was similarly infuriating to a woman watching on Sunday night in Ohio: Rachel Crooks.
Ms. Crooks was a 22-year-old receptionist at Bayrock Group, a real estate investment and development company in Trump Tower in Manhattan, when she encountered Mr. Trump outside an elevator in the building one morning in 2005.
Ms. Leeds in 1978. She said unwanted advances from men were routine throughout her time in business in the 1970s and early 1980s. “We were taught it was our fault,” she said.
Aware that her company did business with Mr. Trump, she turned and introduced herself. They shook hands, but Mr. Trump would not let go, she said. Instead, he began kissing her cheeks. Then, she said, he “kissed me directly on the mouth.”
It didn’t feel like an accident, she said. It felt like a violation.
“It was so inappropriate,” Ms. Crooks recalled in an interview. “I was so upset that he thought I was so insignificant that he could do that.”
Shaken, Ms. Crooks returned to her desk and immediately called her sister, Brianne Webb, in the small town in Ohio where they grew up, and told her what had happened.
“She was very worked up about it,” said Ms. Webb, who recalled pressing her sister for details. “Being from a town of 1,600 people, being naïve, I was like ‘Are you sure he didn’t just miss trying to kiss you on the cheek?’ She said, ‘No, he kissed me on the mouth.’ I was like, ‘That is not normal.’”
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Washington Post: Four women Accuse Trump of Forcibly Groping, Kissing Them (by Sean Sullivan, October 13, 2016):
A third woman says Trump groped her rear end at his Mar-a-Lago resort 13 years ago, the Palm Beach Post reported. The fourth, then a People magazine reporter, says Trump kissed her without her consent when the two were alone in 2005 right before an interview she was about to conduct with Trump and his wife.
Trump and his campaign denied the allegations. But in each of the first three instances, the newspapers spoke to people close to the women — a universe that includes friends, family members, significant others and colleagues — who verified that they told them their stories about what they say happened months or years ago. In the fourth, the reporter wrote a detailed first person account of what she says happened on People's website.
The GOP presidential nominee was considering filing a lawsuit against the Times and was consulting with advisers about his legal options, according to two people close to him. The two people, who requested anonymity to discuss private conversations, said Trump is furious about the accusations made against him in the story and with the newspaper for publishing them.
* * *
Separately, CBS News on Wednesday reported 1992 footage filmed for "Entertainment Tonight" in which Trump is heard commenting about a young girl, "I'm going to be dating her in ten years."
Also Wednesday, Rolling Stone published a story that included the allegations of Cassandra Searles, Miss Washington 2013. In a comment she appended to a post she had put on Facebook earlier this year suggesting that Trump treated pageant contestants “like cattle,” Searles wrote, “He probably doesn’t want me telling the story about that time he continually grabbed my ass and invited me to his hotel room.” Yahoo covered her post and comment in June.
Think Progress: A Comprehensive Guide to Accepting Donald Trump’s Sexual Assault Denials (by Jedd Legum, October 13, 2016):
You also have to believe — either through coincidence or conspiracy — that these women were able to coordinate their stories to match Trump’s own description of his conduct in 2005. You have to believe this even though several of the women made their stories public well before Trump’s admission was known.
This gets confusing, so let’s break down how it all unfolded.
In 1997, Jill Harth — a beauty pageant executive — filed a federal lawsuit alleging Trump “continually made aggressive, unwanted sexual advances toward Harth.” These advances included groping her under a table. She eventually dropped the lawsuit after Trump settled a different suit with her concerning business matters.
So you have to believe Harth was lying.
Temple Taggart, who was Miss Utah in 1997, says that Trump kissed her and other contestants in Miss USA on the mouth without their consent. She told her story to the New York Times in May.
So you have to believe Taggart was lying.
* * *
You also have to believe that at least four women with no connection to each other were somehow able to coordinate their lies for maximum impact.
So it’s possible that this incredible confluence of lies and coincidences — including a key lie from Trump himself — are lining up against Trump, who is completely innocent of these allegations and has never committed sexual assault.
The other possibility is that Trump was telling the truth to Billy Bush and these women are telling the truth.
That’s also possible.
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