More and more women are coming forward to allege that Donald Trump has sexually harassed or assaulted them, and on Wednesday night, journalist Natasha Stoynoff posted her own disturbing account at People.com.
People magazine journalist writes disturbing account of her alleged assault by Donald Trump
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Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.
Stoynoff writes that, in late 2005, she was working on a feature story for People about Donald and Melania Trump’s first wedding anniversary, and traveled to the Mar-a-Lago estate to interview the couple.
While Trump was giving her a tour of the house, Stoynoff writes, he brought her to one room, shut the door, “and within seconds, he was pushing me against the wall, and forcing his tongue down my throat.”
Though Trump’s butler soon interrupted to tell them they had to go to the interview, she writes, after the butler left again the mogul continued to make his advances while they were seated waiting for the “very pregnant” Melania:
“You know we’re going to have an affair, don’t you?” [Trump] declared, in the same confident tone he uses when he says he’s going to make America great again. “Have you ever been to Peter Luger’s for steaks? I’ll take you. We’re going to have an affair, I’m telling you.” He also referenced the infamous cover of the New York Post during his affair with Marla Maples. “You remember,” he said. “Best Sex I Ever Had.”
You can read Stoynoff’s full account, which somehow gets creepier from there, over at People.
A Trump spokesperson told the magazine, “This never happened. There is no merit or veracity to this fabricated story.” And Trump himself tweeted a denial Thursday morning:
(Stroynoff writes that she didn’t mention the incident in the story both because she “was ashamed” and “minimized” what Trump did, and because she “was afraid that a famous, powerful, wealthy man could and would discredit and destroy me.”)
The GOP presidential nominee was recorded on tape in 2005 bragging, “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
At the debate last Sunday, Trump was asked by moderator Anderson Cooper whether Trump had kissed or groped women without their consent, and he said, “No, I have not.”
But Stoynoff isn’t alone here. On Wednesday, the New York Times reported Jessica Leeds’s account that Trump forcibly kissed her and put his hands up her skirt, along with Rachel Crooks’s account that Trump kissed her on the mouth without permission. And a third woman told the Palm Beach Post that Trump had grabbed her rear at Mar-a-Lago.
And even before that, both Jill Harth and Temple Taggart had come forward with similar allegations about Trump. (He’s denied them.)
