A new ad campaign sponsored by George Conway’s Anti-Psychopath PAC features two women, Natasha Stoynoff and Jessica Leeds, who say former President Donald Trump sexually assaulted them. More than a dozen women have described similar encounters with the Republican presidential nominee, and their accounts are consistent with the behavior that Trump bragged about in the Access Hollywood tape that surfaced the month before the 2016 election. One of those women, journalist E. Jean Carroll, obtained a $5 million civil verdict against Trump last year after a New York jury concluded it was more likely than not that he had sexually assaulted her in 1996.
With the exception of the Carroll verdict, all of this information was available to voters in 2016. They nevertheless elected a man who had been credibly described as a sexual predator—by himself as well as his accusers. It therefore seems doubtful that reminding voters of all this will make a difference in this year’s election. Yet the crimes that Carroll et al. allege are far more troubling than Trump’s 34 felony convictions, which Trump’s Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, highlights by depicting the race as a contest between a prosecutor and a felon.
Trump’s status as a convicted felon is based on bookkeeping offenses that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg converted into felonies via a convoluted, legally iffy theory that combined several interacting statutes with questionable assumptions about Trump’s knowledge and intent. The victims in that case, Bragg said, were American voters, who supposedly had a right to hear porn star Stormy Daniels’ account of consensual sex with Trump before they cast their ballots in the 2016 presidential election. According to Bragg, that purported right was violated by the nondisclosure agreement that Trump paid Daniels to sign.
The allegations of sexual assault, by contrast, feature specific, identifiable victims whose rights Trump indisputably violated if these accounts are true. Unlike the 2006 tryst that Daniels described, these alleged encounters were decidedly not consensual.
Stoynoff, then a writer at People magazine, interviewed Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2005. “At one point,” she says in one of the new TV spots, “Melania went upstairs to change her clothes for the next photo shoot, and Trump said to me, ‘I want to show you this beautiful painting, this beautiful room.’ He leads me to this room, pushes me against the wall, and starts kissing me forcefully. I tried to push him. He kept coming back at me. I was in shock and smothered. He had his hands here, against my shoulders. I felt sick inside. I felt horrified.”
According to Stoynoff, the assault was interrupted when “a butler” entered the room. Later, she says, as “Melania was approaching,” Trump said, “You know we’re going to have an affair, don’t you?”
Leeds, a former stockbroker, says she encountered Trump during a 1979 airplane trip. After a flight attendant told Leeds a seat was available in first class, she says in another ad, she found herself sitting next to Trump. “The airplane took off,” she says, “and all of a sudden Donald Trump started groping me. He was trying to kiss me, and I’m trying to push him away. He was basically overpowering me. When he started putting his hand up my skirt, I got out of the seat, grabbed my purse, and went back to my original seat. I certainly was shook up by the whole thing.”
Two years later, Leeds says, she saw Trump at a fundraiser: “He looked at me, and he said, ‘I remember you. You’re that cunt from the airplane.'”
Trump denies these accusations and all of the others. But he described strikingly similar behavior in his 2005 conversation with Access Hollywood host Billy Bush, which was recorded by a hot mic while both men were off camera. “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful [women],” Trump said. “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.” When “you’re a star,” he added, “they let you do it. You can do anything.…Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.’
Trump dismissed that conversation as “locker-room banter.” He averred that “Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course” but added, “I apologize if anyone was offended.”
The problem, of course, was not that Trump had uttered the word pussy. It was that he had boasted about sexually assaulting women. And unlike the women he described, who supposedly let him “do anything” because he was “a star,” women such as Leeds and Stoynoff say they physically resisted, which did not seem to faze him.
If you are determined to vote for Trump, none of this will faze you either. You can dismiss all of Trump’s accusers as politically motivated liars. You can discount a New York jury’s verdict against him, which included a judgment that Trump had defamed Carroll by insisting that she made the whole thing up, for similar reasons. But if you are on the fence, disinclined to vote for Harris because you disagree with many of her positions but not too crazy about Trump either, the argument that he is an admitted “serial predator” who “views women as for his entertainment” and has “said it, point blank” (as Leeds puts it) might give you pause.
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