Donald Trump grabbed a woman and kissed her without her consent at a Mar-a-Lago party in the early 2000s, a new book is reporting.
The book, “All the President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator,” includes allegations of 43 additional instances of inappropriate contact by the president, according to an excerpt of the book published Wednesday by Esquire magazine.
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Twenty-six of those instances involved unwanted sexual contact.
The except doesn’t dig into all of those allegations, but it does detail a story by Karen Johnson, a woman who says she attended a New Year’s Eve party at Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida club. At the time of the New Year’s Eve party, Trump was reportedly dating Melania Knauss, who he would later marry, and engaging in what the book called “a wave of allegedly unwanted touching.”
After midnight, Johnson said she was preparing to return home with her ailing husband and a relative. She went to the bathroom, and as she walked out, she said that Trump pulled her behind a tapestry.
“I was so scared because of who he was. I didn’t have a say in the matter.”
“I’m a tall girl and I had six-inch heels on, and I still remember looking up at him. And he’s strong, and he just kissed me,” she told the authors of the book, Barry Levine and Monique El-Faizy. “I was so scared because of who he was… I don’t even know where it came from. I didn’t have a say in the matter.”
Afterward, Johnson said she stood next to Trump while he said goodbye to a few leaving guests. “I was afraid to say what had happened,” she said. “I didn’t even know how it happened.”
READ: Trump was just accused of sexual assault by the journalist E. Jean Carroll
After the alleged incident, Trump repeatedly called Johnson, offering to fly her to New York for the day. She kept turning him down, and eventually, the calls stopped. Johnson told her relative about the incident, as well as a friend; the authors of the book corroborated Johnson’s account with her friend.
She was afraid to tell anybody what had happened, for fear of being told that she must have “asked for it” in some way. But when she heard the “Access Hollywood tape,” Johnson said she was shocked.
“When he says that thing, ‘Grab them in the pussy,’ that hits me hard because when he grabbed me and pulled me into the tapestry, that’s where he grabbed me — he grabbed me there in my front and pulled me in,” she said.
The White House didn’t immediately reply to a VICE News request for comment, but Trump has previously denied all sexual impropriety. So far, more than a dozen women have said that he acted inappropriately with them.
Cover: American real estate developer Donald Trump accepts a drink during a New Year’s Eve party at the Mar-a-Lago estate, Palm Beach, Florida, December 31, 2002. Behind him is his future wife, model Melania Knauss. (Photo by Davidoff Studios Photography/Getty Images)