Trump on accuser: ‘Believe me, she would not be my first choice’
Trump on the woman who claimed he assaulted her on a plane: “She would not be my first choice … That would not be my first choice.” pic.twitter.com/o7VMgtvVMx
— T. Becket Adams (@BecketAdams) October 14, 2016
Donald Trump on Friday ratcheted up his attacks on the women accusing him of sexual misconduct, mocking their looks and characterizing them as publicity seekers.
{mosads}Seven women in the past week have come forward to accuse the Republican of touching and kissing them inappropriately, with the latest, former “Apprentice” contestant Summer Zervos, lodging her allegations at the same time Trump was holding a rally in Greensboro, N.C.
While the Republican presidential nominee has vehemently denied the accusations, his pushback entered new territory Friday as he called out the women directly and suggested they weren’t attractive enough to warrant his attention.
He singled out Jessica Leeds, who went to The New York Times to allege that Trump groped her during a flight more than 30 years ago.
“Believe me, she would not be my first choice,” Trump said. “That I can tell you. You don’t know. That would not be my first choice.”
He also appeared to mock the appearance of People magazine writer Natasha Stoynoff, who says Trump pushed her against a wall and forcibly kissed her in 2005 during an interview at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
“When you looked at that horrible woman last night, you said, ‘I don’t think so,’ ” he said.
“Whoever she is, wherever she comes from, the stories are total fiction. They are 100 percent made up. They never happened. They never would happen,” he said.
“She is a liar. Check out her Facebook page. You’d understand,” he added.
Since the public release of a 2005 recording last week in which Trump brags about groping and kissing women without their consent, several women have come forward to accuse him of sexual assault.
The New York Times reported Leeds’s story this week, along with that of another woman who said Trump kissed her against her will at Trump Tower in 2005.
Zervos, meanwhile, held a press conference Friday alongside lawyer Gloria Allred and said that Trump groped and kissed her in 2007 while she was meeting with him about a potential job.
She said Trump set up meeting at a hotel room in Beverly Hills, where he greeted her with an “open-mouthed kiss.” Zervos said she was stunned and moved to the other side of the room to get away from him.
“He grabbed my shoulder and kissed me again aggressively and placed his hand on my breast,” Zervos said, choking back tears. “I pulled back and walked to another part of the room. He grabbed my hand and walked me into the bedroom. I walked out.”
Trump denied the accusations in a statement, saying he only “vaguely” remembers Zervos and that he never met her inside of a hotel room or touched her inappropriately.
He blamed the media for “throwing due diligence and fact-finding to the side in a rush to file their stories first.”
“That is not who I am as a person, and it is not how I’ve conducted my life,” Trump said. “In fact, Ms. Zervos continued to contact me for help, emailing my office on April 14th of this year asking that I visit her restaurant in California.”
On Friday, another accuser told The Washington Post that Trump put his hands up her skirt while at a crowded Manhattan nightclub in the early 1990s.
Trump denied the Post report Friday, saying, “I just heard this one. It’s like, it’s like unbelievable.”
“Even a simple investigation would have shown these allegations against me in just about all cases — it’s false,” he said.
Trump questioned the women’s motives, saying they could be making the accusations for fame or money.
“Some are doing it probably for a little fame. They get some free fame. It’s a total setup,” he said. “Sometimes they do it for fame. Maybe they get money, who knows.”
Amid the criticism of his accusers, Trump raised eyebrows with a comment about his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.
“I’m standing at my podium and she walks in front of me. She walks in front of me, you know, and when she walked in front of me, believe me, I wasn’t impressed,” Trump said to laughter from the crowd.
As he did on Thursday, Trump portrayed the sexual assault accusations as a conspiracy concocted by the media, the Clinton campaign and corporate interests to destroy his presidential campaign.
He said reporters at The New York Times, which published the first accusations this week, are “corporate lobbyists” carrying out the agenda of a Mexican billionaire.
“The largest shareholder in the Times is Carlos Slim. Now Carlos Slim, as you know, comes from Mexico. He’s given many millions of dollars to the Clintons and their initiative,” Trump said.
“Reporters at The New York Times — they are not journalists — they are corporate lobbyists for Carlos Slim and Hillary Clinton. … We just can’t do this. We can’t let this happen.”
Returning to the groping allegations, he questioned why women aren’t saying similar things about President Obama, who campaigned against Trump on Friday in Ohio.
“He is talking about me like knows me,” Trump said of Obama. “I don’t know him, he doesn’t know me, and why doesn’t some woman maybe come up and say what they say falsely about me — they can say it about him. They can say it about anybody.”
Jonathan Easley and Nikita Vladimirov contributed.
Updated at 6:12 p.m.
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