(WASHINGTON POST)
By Eugene Robinson
Let’s begin with the People magazine writer who says that Donald Trump took her into a room at his Mar-a-Lago estate — while his pregnant wife was changing her clothes upstairs — and “within seconds he was pushing me against the wall and forcing his tongue down my throat.”
Natasha Stoynoff is an experienced journalist with multiple books to her credit, and her story is similar to those told by others. A second woman told the Palm Beach Post that she, too, was groped by Trump at the Florida estate. Two other women told the New York Times of being accosted by Trump, one of them groped and the other forcibly kissed. A former Miss Washington says Trump “continually grabbed my ass” at a beauty pageant. Another woman alleged in a lawsuit that Trump pushed her against a wall and tried to put his hands up her dress.
Trump denies it all. But there is reason to believe these stories of sexual assault — let’s call it what it is — because of Trump’s own words about the way he treats women.
This is the very behavior Trump boasts of in the “Access Hollywood” videotape that surfaced last week. He relates how he “moved on” co-host Nancy O’Dell, a married woman, without success. He says that when he sees beautiful women, “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.” He says that “when you’re a star,” you can “grab them by the p—y. You can do anything.”
At Sunday’s debate, Trump tried to dismiss those unguarded words as “locker-room talk.” Pressed by moderator Anderson Cooper, he claimed never to have actually done any of these things. Imagine how that denial sounded to women who knew otherwise.
The creepiest new revelation comes from CBS News, which discovered footage from a 1992 interview in which Trump says of a girl who looks to be about 10 years old: “I am going to be dating her in 10 years. Can you believe it?” And there have also been reports in the Guardian and BuzzFeed about Trump walking in on contestants in the Miss USA and Miss Teen USA pageants when they were half-dressed.
