Here are all the women who have accused Donald Trump of sexual assault
In the last 24 hours, Donald Trump has faced a flurry of accusations from women who claim he sexually assaulted them.
The allegations came after CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Trump during Sunday’s presidential debate if the Republican nominee had ever kissed or groped women without their consent (after 11-year-old footage published by the Washington Post showed Trump suggesting he had).
“No, I have not,” Trump said.
That denial has launched a wave of women who came forward alleging that Trump had, in fact, made unwanted sexual contact with them, which the Justice Department describes as sexual assault. Trump lashed out against the reports at a rally Thursday, calling them “pure fiction” and “outright lies.”
These women are not the first to come forward with such accusations toward Trump, as detailed in our list below. Here’s a look at the women who have come forward since Trump launched his presidential campaign.
Kristin Anderson
Anderson told The Washington Post Friday Trump reached under her skirt and groped her in the early 1990s. Anderson said she was in her early 20s at the time and deep in conversation on a crowded couch at a Manhattan nightclub with her friends when someone reached up her miniskirt and touched her genitals.
She told the newspaper it wasn’t until she fled the couch that she saw it was Trump who’d touched her.
“He was so distinctive looking — with the hair and the eyebrows. I mean, nobody else has those eyebrows,” she said.
The Post contacted Anderson after hearing her story from a person who knew of the incident.
“Mr. Trump strongly denies this phony allegation by someone looking to get some free publicity. It is totally ridiculous,” Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks told the Post.
Natasha Stoynoff
In an article for People magazine Wednesday night, Stoynoff, a writer for the magazine, said Trump forcibly kissed her when she was assigned to do a profile on the real estate magnate and his wife, Melania, to mark their one-year wedding anniversary in 2005. Stoynoff said that she was with the couple at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, when Melania left the room.
Trump shut the door behind us. I turned around, and within seconds he was pushing me against the wall and forcing his tongue down my throat.
Stoynoff wrote that Trump only stopped when his butler entered the room to inform them Melania would be returning soon. But before his wife returned, Stoynoff recalled Trump telling her, “We’re going to have an affair, I’m telling you.” Stoynoff said she was afraid that a “famous, powerful, wealthy man could and would discredit and destroy” her.
Trump tweeted Thursday morning that the “incident” did not happen.
Mindy McGillivray
The Palm Beach Post published a report Wednesday evening in which McGillivray, a 36-year-old Palm Springs resident, said she was groped by Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2003. Photographer Ken Davidoff, whom she was assisting on a photo shoot, also recalled the incident, telling the Post that McGillivray pulled him aside and said, “Donald just grabbed my ass!’’
The then-23-year-old recalled:
“All of a sudden I felt a grab, a little nudge. I think it’s Ken’s camera bag, that was my first instinct. I turn around and there’s Donald. He sort of looked away quickly.”
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment by the Post.
Jessica Leeds
A now-74-year-old Manhattan resident, Leeds told The New York Times in an article Wednesday that she was sitting next to Trump, who she had never met, on an airplane in the early 1980s, when the real estate mogul lifted the armrest and “grabbed her breasts and tried to put his hand up her skirt.”
“He was like an octopus,” Leeds told the Times. “He was everywhere.”
Leeds, who called the incident an “assault,” said she motivated to come forward with her story after watching Sunday’s debate.
“I wanted to punch the screen,” she said.
Rachael Crooks
In the same Times story Wednesday, Crooks said she was working in Trump Tower in 2005 as a 22-year-old receptionist when she introduced herself to Trump for the first time.
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 told the Times. “I was so upset that he thought I was so insignificant that he could do that.”
(Trump has denied the accusations by Leeds and Crooks, both in the Times article and on Twitter.)
Temple Taggart
In a sweeping New York Times article last May on Trump’s conduct with women, Taggart recalled how as the 21-year-old Miss Utah at the Miss USA pageant, she was kissed directly on the lips by Trump, who owned the Miss Universe Organization.
“I thought, ‘Oh my God, gross,'” she recalled. “He was married to Marla Maples at the time. I think there were a few other girls that he kissed on the mouth. I was like ‘Wow, that’s inappropriate.’”
Trump denied the incident to the Times, “saying he is reluctant to kiss strangers on the lips,” according to the paper.
Jill Harth
A month earlier in The Boston Globe
, another pageant organizer recalled being groped by Trump underneath a table at a luxurious dinner event in Manhattan.
“When we got to the dinner table, Donald started right in on the groping under the table,” said Harth, who added that Trump demanded she sit next to him.
According to court documents obtained by the Globe, Harth said Trump’s actions continued beyond that too.
Trump took her into an empty bedroom — the one normally used by daughter Ivanka, who at the time was 11. Trump forcibly “kissed, fondled, and restrained” her from leaving, according to Harth’s suit.
Trump told the Globe that Harth and her boyfriend, George Houraney, who confirmed her account, only surfaced the allegation because they were losing a business dispute over a pageant competition.
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