As I have noted in Facebook posts and elsewhere, perhaps having daughters of my own and, now, granddaughters, I take claims of sexual abuse of women by powerful figures and the objectification of women seriously. The irony, of course, is that Donald Trump's manly men supporters and profosseional Christian parasites seem utterly un-phased by Donald Trump's 2005 "hot mic" tape. Who would have thought a gay man would uphold the dignity of women and chivalry, if you will, more so than heterosexual men and "godly Christians." Tonight, the New York Times, the Palm Beach Post and BuzzFeed are all publishing stories that would demonstrate that the Trump revealed in the 2005 tape is the real Donald Trump. While the Trump campaign is denying the validity of the claims and threatening lawsuits, I tend to believe the stories of the accusers. As for the lawsuit threats, if the stories are true, Trump would be insane to file lawsuits given the discovery power that would be gifted to the defendants in the lawsuits. Here are highlights from the New York Times story:
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.
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.”
In the days since Mr. Trump’s campaign was jolted by a 2005 recording that caught him bragging about pushing himself on women, he has insisted, as have his aides, that it was simply macho bluster. “It’s just words,” he has said repeatedly.
And his hope for salvaging his candidacy rests heavily on whether voters believe that claim.
They should not, say Ms. Leeds and Ms. Crooks, whose stories have never been made public before. And their accounts echo those of other women who have previously come forward, like Temple Taggart, a former Miss Utah, who said that Mr. Trump kissed her on the mouth more than once when she was a 21-year-old pageant contestant.
They said they were sickened by what they heard. “It made me shake,” said Linda Ross, a neighbor and friend who spoke with Ms. Leeds about the interaction about six months ago. Like several of Ms. Leeds’s friends, Ms. Ross encouraged her to tell her story to the news media. Ms. Leeds had resisted until Sunday’s debate, which she watched with Ms. Ross.
When Mr. Trump denied having ever sexually assaulted women, in response to a question from Anderson Cooper of CNN, Ms. Ross said she immediately looked at Ms. Leeds in disbelief. “Now we know he lied straight up,” Ms. Ross recalled saying.
There is more. Read the entire piece. The Palm Beach Post accounts are similar to those in the Times. What is more disturbing to me is the BuzzFeed story that recounts Trump's walking in on naked Miss Teen USA contestants, some of whom were a mere 15 years of age. Here are highlights:
BuzzFeed has an explosive new story out this morning accusing Donald Trump of walking in on teen beauty queens, one as young as 15, while they were undressed during a Miss Teen USA pageant in 1997.
Mariah Billado, former Miss Vermont Teen USA, allegedly complained to Ivanka about her father’s intrusion, with Ivanka reportedly saying, “Yeah, he does that
These new allegation mirror what Trump told Howard Stern in 2005 when he bragged that he’d go backstage before the show to make sure “everything is good.” From CNN:
“Well, I’ll tell you the funniest is that before a show, I’ll go backstage and everyone’s getting dressed, and everything else, and you know, no men are anywhere, and I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant and therefore I’m inspecting it,” Trump said. “You know, I’m inspecting because I want to make sure that everything is good.”
The man is beyond disgusting. So to are his supporters. When Hillary Clinton called Trump's supporters as "deporables." she was more accurate than she knew.
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