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Sixth woman accuses former president George Bush sr of groping her – when she was 16

Former president George Bush senior has been accused by a sixth person sexual harassment, with a woman claiming she was groped at the 2003 event when she was 16.

Roslyn Corrigan said Mr Bush, then 79, dropped his hand to her buttocks and squeezed as they posed for a photo at a 2003 gathering of CIA officers north of Houston in Texas.

Ms Corrigan attended the event with her mother and father, who was an intelligence analyst, she told Time.

“As soon as the picture was being snapped on the ‘one-two-three’, he dropped his hands from my waist down to my buttocks and gave it a nice, ripe squeeze, which would account for the fact that in the photograph my mouth is hanging wide open,” Ms Corrigan said.

“I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, what just happened?'”

She said her “initial reaction was absolute horror”.

“I didn’t say anything. What does a teenager say to the ex-president of the United States? Like, ‘Hey dude, you shouldn’t have touched me like that?'”

Ms Corrigan did not say anything at the time, and said people were sometimes dismissive of her story.

“I don’t know, maybe it never really hit people that I was a child at the time and that goes beyond a guy beyond inappropriate in the workplace to a peer or somebody in his age range.

“I was a child.”

Time spoke with seven people who said they had been told by Ms Corrigan about the encounter in the years afterward.

She told her mother what happened as soon as Mr Bush stepped away, the mother told Time.

A spokesman for the former president, Jim McGrath, says Bush has apologised “to anyone he may have offended during a photo op”.

The spokesman said it was an “attempt at humour” and Mr Bush’s use of a wheelchair meant his arms fall below people’s waist when he takes pictures with them.

He is standing up in the photos with Ms Corrigan, and she said the excuse that he was “senile” was “not true”.

“When I heard that was the reason, like, ‘Oh, he’s just an old man and he doesn’t know any better and he’s just being harmless and playful and it’s just where his arm falls … I just burst into uncontrollable sobbing,” Ms Corrigan said.

“I just couldn’t sit with that. I can’t. I cannot sit with that.”

She is the sixth woman to accuse him of inappropriate touching.

-with AAP

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