The report on Wednesday was followed by a stream of similar allegations from several other women, putting more pressure on Trump as he lags Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in national opinion polls.
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The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.
On Wednesday, The New York Times published an article titled “Two Women Say Donald Trump Touched Them Inappropriately” which details yet two more accounts of women who were sexually assaulted by the Republican presidential nominee, just days after Trump denied sexually assaulting any women during a presidential debate. He has consistently said that all he is guilty of is lewd locker room talk. Rocked by allegations of sexual assault, Donald Trump on Thursday lashed out at his female accusers as “horrible, disgusting liars” as the deeply divisive presidential campaign sank further into charges and countercharges of predatory treatment of women.
Donald Trump tore into The New York Times, the “corporate media” and Hillary Clinton at a rally Thursday afternoon in West Palm Beach.
Trump said he was preparing a lawsuit against the New York Times for its coverage of sexual harassment allegations against him.
Speaking Thursday in Florida, Trump said the press “will seek to destroy your career and your family and that “They will seek to destroy everything about you including your reputation”.
The Times story featured two women, Jessica Leeds and Rachel Crooks, who said that Trump made inappropriate physical advances on them.
The essence of a libel claim, of course, is the protection of one’s reputation.
Leeds, the other woman in the Times article, contacted the newspaper after Sunday’s debate, when Trump was asked by CNN’s Anderson Cooper if he had ever done the things he described in that video.
“It’s one of countless examples of how he has treated women his whole life and I have to tell you that I listen to all this and I feel it so personally”, she said.
Trump on Thursday took to Twitter to denounce the Times story as a “total fabrication”, and to assert that the incident cited by People “did not happen”. If the newspaper did not comply, Trump, who says the allegations are fabricated, would “pursue all available actions and remedies”, the lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, said in a letter. “We can’t expose our children to this any longer, not for another minute, let alone for four years”. “This is disgraceful”, she said.
The whirling dervish that is Donald J. Trump spun ever-faster on Thursday, shredding nearly everything in his range of vision – Hillary Clinton, his fellow Republicans who fail to support him unequivocally, the growing chorus of women accusing him of sexual misconduct, and especially the press.
And Mark Burnett, the creator of NBC’s reality show The Apprentice that starred Trump for years, felt compelled to distance himself from Trump, saying he does not condone or support him. The only thing Clinton has going for her is the press. Trump also dispatched his daughter Ivanka to the Pennsylvania suburbs on Thursday in the hope that she can lift his standing in the crucial swing state. And when one considers the themes common between Nazi propaganda films and the films made by top Trump campaign staffers Stephen K. Bannon and David Bossie (as analyzed by AlterNet), we should hardly be surprised.
However, not all of Trump’s supporters were ready to find fault with the candidate.
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Trump has issued denied these accusations, along with those of former pageant contestant Temple Taggart and photography assistant Mindy McGillivray, but his denials have done little to quell the growing outrage. “And I will tell you: No, I have not”. Trump asked incredulously during a speech in West Palm Beach, Florida, referencing the allegations against him in People magazine. We’re getting people beheaded in our own country. It is cynical and hypocritical for Trump’s campaign to argue that Bill Clinton’s accusers should be believed-and Clinton herself castigated for victim intimidation in the absence of any substantial evidence-while it reflexively attempts to discredit Trump’s accusers. He’s also mounting an implicit effort to intimidate other women who might step forward and coupling his discussion of the legal threat levied at the Times with further smears of the women making the claims.
