Donald Trump Faces New Allegations of Inappropriate Contact
Two new women accuse Donald Trump of inappropriate contact, after media outlets reported claims from several women.
Both of them told the New York Times that Donald Trump groped or kissed them.
A reporter for People magazine wrote a first person account describing being forcibly kissed by Donald Trump.
The Republican nominee’s campaign have rejected the claims, describing the NYT article as “defamatory”.
Donald Trump’s camp has made public a letter to the NYT threatening legal action unless the paper retracts the article, which it called “a politically-motivated effort to defeat Mr. Trump’s candidacy”.
The publication said it was standing by its article.
Late last week, a video shot in 2005 emerged which showed Donald Trump making inappropriate remarks about groping women.
The Republican apologized for the comments – which were widely condemned – but described them as “locker-room talk”.
Many top Republicans, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, have since distanced themselves from Donald Trump.
However, four Republican members of Congress who had urged Donald Trump to step aside have changed position, saying they backed their party.
In the NYT article, Jessica Leeds, 74, from Manhattan, said she had been sitting next to Donald Trump in the first-class cabin of a flight to New York when he lifted the armrest and began to touch her.
“He was like an octopus… his hands were everywhere,” said Jessica Leeds, who was 38 at the time.
“It was an assault.”
A second woman, Rachel Crooks, said she was kissed on the lips by Donald Trump outside a lift in Trump Tower when she was a 22-year-old receptionist at a real estate company there.
“It was so inappropriate,” Rachel Crooks told the NYT.
“I was so upset that he thought I was so insignificant that he could do that.”
Neither women reported their accounts to the authorities, but both shared what happened to them with friends and family.
In People magazine, meanwhile, writer Natasha Stoynoff said an incident took place in December 2005, when she went to interview the Trumps ahead of their first wedding anniversary.
Donald Trump said he wanted to show her around their Florida estate, including one “tremendous” room.
“We walked into that room alone, and Trump shut the door behind us. I turned around, and within seconds he was pushing me against the wall and forcing his tongue down my throat,” Natasha Stoynoff wrote.
A spokesman said the account in People had “no merit or veracity”.
Another woman, Mindy McGillivray, now 36, told the Palm Beach Post she was 23 when Donald Trump grabbed her bottom at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida in 2003.
Her companion that day, photographer Ken Davidoff, told the newspaper he remembers her pulling him aside moments afterwards and telling him: “Donald just grabbed my ass!”
Donald Trump’s campaign rejected this claim.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign said the “disturbing” New York Times story “sadly fits everything we know about the way Donald Trump has treated women”.
“These reports suggest that he lied on the debate stage and that the disgusting behavior he bragged about in the tape is more than just words.”