Trump’s decades of lechery come back to haunt him
FORCED to make a rare apology in the latest scandal over his obscene remarks about women, Donald Trump pleaded that they did not ‘reflect who I am’. But that flies in the face of years in which he has faced ugly allegations about his treatment of women.
Ever since the late 1970s, when he frequented New York’s infamous Studio 54 nightclub, he’s said to have regarded women as sexual objects to be collected for the greater glory of his ego.
Back then, he boasted that he’d slept with so many women that the threat of contracting Aids or another sexually transmitted disease was his own ‘personal Vietnam’, adding crudely: ‘I feel like a great and very brave soldier.’
Trump has recently claimed that his outrageous comments about women were made ‘for the purpose of entertainment’ as he promoted the beauty pageants whose rights he has owned.
Calling comedienne Rosie O’Donnell a ‘big fat pig’, ‘disgusting’ and a ‘slob’, or dismissing actress Bette Midler as ‘ugly’ and model Heidi Klum as ‘sadly, no longer a ten’, were – he implied – largely all part of his image of a beauty pageant showman whose reputation hinged on being surrounded by attractive women.
Indeed, for decades, he’s boasted over the airwaves to his ‘shock jock’ radio host friend Howard Stern about his conquests and revealed his neanderthal views on the fairer sex.
And not just women in general – he has even described his own daughter, Ivanka, as ‘voluptuous’ and had admitted to Stern how, then aged 60, he would ‘have no problem’ having sex with 24- year- olds. In radio recordings unearthed this weekend by CNN, Trump is heard saying he ‘couldn’t care less’ if he satisfies a woman he sleeps with, claimed he’d had a sexual threesome and said it was ‘check-out time’ once a woman reached the age of 35.
Much of this has until now been dismissed by Trump and his supporters as harmless locker room banter.
The man who claims he lost his virginity at 14 to a ‘hot little girl in high school’ has twice been accused of sexual assault.
In a column headlined ‘Donald Trump, groper in chief ’, the New York Times recounted a 1992 incident when Trump sat next to a woman called Jill Harth, half of a couple who were his business partners in his first beauty contest, the American Dream pageant in the early 1990s. With her partner present, Trump is said to have ‘ran his hands up her skirt, to her crotch’.
For their part, Trump’s lawyers strenuously denied such claims. Harth later withdrew her allegations when Trump settled a separate legal dispute with her ex-partner, while Trump claims she pursued him.
In another incident, at the time of their 1991 divorce, Trump’s first wife, Ivana, claimed in a sworn deposition that he raped her two years earlier, pulling out her hair and holding back her arms. Trump denied the allegation and, after receiving a hefty financial settlement, Ivana later retracted her claims and clarified that it was not rape in ‘a literal or criminal sense’.
The allegation resurfaced in Matt Frei’s Channel 4 documentary The Mad World Of Donald Trump.
Needless to say, she divorced Trump because he was unfaithful – rubbing salt into the wound by regularly parading his lover, model Marla Maples, around the world with him.
Since the election campaign started, other women have come forward with accounts of deeply unsettling encounters with Trump.
Temple Taggart told the New York Times that when she was the 21year-old Miss Utah, she was startled by his forwardness with her and other young contestants when he took over the Miss USA pageant in 1997. Trump, then married to Miss Maples, was said to have introduced himself by kissing her on the lips. She recalled: ‘I thought: “Oh my God, gross!” I think there were a few other girls he kissed on the mouth. I was like: “Wow, that’s inappropriate!”.’
Mr Trump dismissed the article, saying: ‘The failing [New York Times] wrote yet another hit piece on me.’ In the same article, Taggart claimed other women said they were reduced to tears by the tycoon’s unsettlingly close inspection of their bodies as they stood in revealing outfits at rehearsals.
In their first TV debate, Hillary Clinton embarrassed Trump by reminding him of another beauty queen he had humiliated – the 1996 Miss Universe winner Alicia Machado, who he dubbed ‘Miss Piggy’ after she put on weight. The public shaming led to her suffering from anorexia and bulimia for five years, she says. Louise Sunshine, who worked for Trump’s property empire in the same era, told the Washington Post how Trump kept an unflattering photo of her – the ‘fat picture’, she called it – that he would show when she did something he didn’t like. It was ‘a reminder that I wasn’t perfect’, she said.
Trump responded to such claims by hitting out at unfair media coverage and saying that he had been ‘very, very good for women’ and ‘way ahead of the curve’.
Trump’s presidential campaign has been possible because he became such a huge star hosting the reality shows The Apprentice and Celebrity Apprentice. He once suggestively told a female contestant, an ex-Playboy Playmate who begged not to be booted off Celebrity Apprentice: ‘That must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees.’
But that was nothing, apparently, to his behaviour off screen, according to the Associated Press. Former staff and contestants told AP how Trump would rate women contenders by the size of their breasts and discussed which women he would want to sleep with. Although the show is about people’s business ability, Trump is said to have called for female contestants to wear shorter, more revealing dresses, said a TV producer.
A former crew member recalled a woman contestant ‘shrinking in her seat’ when Trump announced in front of all the other contenders he would sleep with her. The Trump campaign described these allegations as ‘outlandish’ and ‘unsubstantiated’. That said, in his 2004 book How To Get Rich, he wrote that ‘all the women on The Apprentice flirted with me – consciously or uncon-
‘Women were reduced to tears’
sciously. That’s to be expected.’ Meanwhile, Trump is being sued by former employees at the Trump National Golf Course in California who claim he wanted to sack women staff who were ‘not pretty enough’ or ‘old or fat’. Managers allegedly would arrange for the most attractive women to work shifts when Trump was visiting.
Indeed, Trump’s three wives have suffered his lack of gallantry.
When first wife Ivana left him after he cheated on her with Miss Maples, she confronted the model on a ski slope at Aspen. The unchivalrous Trump fled, skiing awkwardly down the mountain.
Maples duly became wife No 2 but the marriage lasted only six years. Trump later conceded that when they walked down the aisle, he was already ‘bored’ with her, saying: ‘I kept thinking: “What the hell am I doing here?”’ Wife No 3 Melania has had to put up with him publicly calling her ‘ his supermodel’ and boasting to Howard Stern about their amazing sex.
Naturally, there are many who believe this monstrous egotist has always vastly over-egged his success with beautiful women.
For example, friends of Princess Diana rejected Trump’s claims that he could have seduced – or ‘ nailed’ her, as Stern crudely put it to him – following her divorce.
Trump said the princess was ‘crazy but these are minor details’.
TV presenter Selina Scott said the princess had told her that Trump had bombarded her flowers and gave her ‘the creeps’.
Many of the women who have crossed Trump’s predatory path are convinced he genuinely believed they would be magnetically attracted to him. But Trump may soon find America’s women voters find him anything but irresistible.