Accusers: Weinstein fell — why not Trump?
Almost a year after New Yorker Jessica Leeds and other women stepped forward with harrowing accounts of being sexually assaulted by a powerful man, another scandal with similar elements exploded.
Only this time, the punishment was swift and devastating.
"It is hard to reconcile that Harvey Weinstein could be brought down with this, and [President Donald] Trump just continues to be the Teflon Don," said Leeds, who claims she was groped 30 years ago on a plane by the man whose presence she cannot escape now that he sits in the Oval Office.
In Florida, Melinda McGillivray, was having much the same reaction.
"What pisses me off is that the guy is president," McGillivray, who a year ago went public with allegations that Trump grabbed her at Mar-a-Lago in 2003 when she was 23. "It's that simple."
Leeds and McGillivray were among the 11 women who came forward in the 2016 campaign to accuse the thenRepublican presidential candidate of unwanted touching or kissing. Trump called the charges "pure fiction" and referred to the women as "horrible, horrible liars."
Their claims did not stop the celebrity real estate titan on his climb to the most powerful office in the world.
Since then, numerous men in high places have been felled by charges of sexual misconduct. Most notable among them were Bill O'Reilly, the star Fox News anchor ousted less than a year after Roger Ailes, the network's cofounder; and Weinstein, once regarded as one of the most influential figures in the entertainment business.
The Weinstein which has featured graphic accounts of assault from a string of celebrity accusers, has sparked a national debate about sexual harassment. Many women, inspired by a #MeToo campaign, have taken to social media to tell their own stories, and calls to the National Sexual Assault Hotline have risen sharply.
But for Trump's accusers, the renewed debate offers a reminder that their allegations did not have the same effect.
Trump, unlike Weinstein, was able to deflect their claims
despite the disclosure of a video in which he was heard bragging about the kind of behavior some of the women had alleged. Trump has never followed through with his vow to sue his accusers or produce the "substantial evidence" he said would refute their claims.
So far, the allegations against the president have led to a single new lawsuit filed by a Trump accuser who argues that the president defamed her when he denied her allegations
a case that Trump's lawyer Marc Kasowitz called a "completely contrived, totally meritless lawsuit, which we expect to be summarily dismissed."
Kasowitz did not respond to questions from The Washington Post about the other women's claims and why Trump has not produced the evidence he said would to disprove them.
The frustrations of some Trump accusers surfaced publicly in the days after the New York Times revealed the allegations against Weinstein.
"My pain is everyday with bastard Trump as President," tweeted Jill Harth, who once worked with Trump on organizing beauty pageants and sued him in 1997, claiming he had repeatedly groped her breasts, tried to touch her genitals and kissed her against her will. "No one gets it unless it happens to them. NO one!"
Harth, who is now a makeup artist in New York and declined to be interviewed, also accused Trump of getting into bed, uninvited, with one of the 22-year-old contestants in the early 1990s, according to allegations detailed in the Boston Globe.
Cathy Heller, who last year told the Guardian that Trump forcibly kissed the side of her mouth during a brunch at Mara-Lago in 1997, expressed dismay that "nothing stuck" against him.
Heller said she wondered whether the fame of Weinstein's accusers who include Oscar winners such as Gwyneth Paltrow played a role in how their claims were received.
"Alot of them were actresses we've all heard of," said Heller, 64. "When it's a celebrity, it has more weight than just someone who he met at Mar-a-Lago or a beauty pageant contestant. They're not people we've heard of. And that, in our society, has much more weight because they're famous."
Heller said Weinstein's removal from his production company made her glad that "finally something was really done and a guy finally got his dues, his just desserts," she said. "We'll see about Trump. It's never too late."
McGillivray, now 37, said she was initially afraid to speak out, calling it "petrifying." But she said she felt driven by a patriotic duty as well as a desire to do right by her teenage daughter.
"I wanted to be heard," said McGillivray, who lives in Palm Springs, Florida, not far from Mar-a-Lago, the president's private club.
Allegations about Trump's behavior toward women became an issue early in his candidacy and lingered for months, exploding in early October when The Washington Post published the 2005 "Access Hollywood" video in which he boasted in vulgar terms about grabbing women by the genitals and kissing them. The then-GOP nominee said the remarks "locker-room banter," adding: "I apologize if anyone was offended."
That disclosure was followed by a string of accusations concerning incidents alleged to have occurred over several decades, starting in the early 1980s and continuing until at least 2007. The accusers included several women whose careers depended on Trump, in addition to women he encountered by happenstance.
Polls showed that a clear majority of voters came to believe that Trump had committed the kind of behavior described by his accusers.
A Washington Post poll three weeks before the election found that more than twothirds of registered voters including almost half of Republicans thought that Trump probably had made unwanted sexual advances toward women.
But the specific allegations did little to budge an electorate that had become almost tribal in its divisions.
"Sexual abuse should not be a partisan issue, but it frequently is," said conservative commentator Amanda Carpenter. "That to me is maddening, just to watch women become fodder, to watch women become cannon fodder for these men. It's gut-wrenching."
After the allegations against Weinstein were made public, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel argued on CNN that Trump's alleged offenses were "not even comparable" to Weinstein's, adding that "to even make that comparison is disrespectful to the president."
McDaniel tried to turn the Weinstein case on the Democrats whose campaigns he had helped finance, tweeting on Oct. 7: "Whose side is Hillary Clinton on: Harvey Weinstein's or his victims?"
Unlike Weinstein, Trump responded to the accusations against him with vehement denials and fierce counterpunching. Although he apologized for his comments heard on the "Access Hollywood" tape, he attacked the credibility of the women making specific claims.
Trump deemed their accounts a "total fabrication," "totally and absolutely false" and "pure fiction." In the cases of two of the women, he urged the public to judge whether they were attractive enough for him to have assaulted them.
"Believe me: She would not be my first choice. That I can tell you," he said of Leeds.
Trump's pushback led one of his accusers, Summer Zervos, a former contestant on Trump's reality television show, "The Apprentice," to file a defamation lawsuit against him three days before he took the oath of office.