Advertisement

Trump rubbishes Apprentice contestant’s groping claim

Two more women have come forward with claims Donald Trump groped them, including a contestant on his show, The Apprentice.

The latest allegations emerged on Friday as the Republican presidential candidate said accusations of sexual misconduct against him were part of a plot to discredit him ahead of the election.

Summer Zervos, who competed on the television show’s fifth season in 2006, gave a news conference with celebrity attorney Gloria Allred in Los Angeles, saying Trump tried to get her to lie down on a bed with him when she met him in 2007 to discuss a possible job.

Trump Clinton debate

Trump says Clinton is waging a vicious campaign to discredit him. Photo: Getty

“He then asked me to sit next to him. I complied,” Zervos said.

“He then grabbed my shoulder and began kissing me again very aggressively and placed his hand on my breast.”

Separately, the Washington Post published an interview with a woman who said Trump put his hand up her skirt in a crowded New York nightclub in the early 1990s in an unwanted advance, when she had never even met him.

“He did touch my vagina through my underwear, absolutely,” Kristin Anderson said in a video interview on the newspaper’s website.

“It wasn’t a sexual come-on. I don’t know why he did it.

“It was like just to prove that he could do it,” she told the paper.

At a campaign rally on Friday afternoon, Trump angrily denounced the allegations that have been made about him by a series of women in recent days, saying that all the accusations about him involving women were fabricated.

“I don’t know who these people are. I look on television, I think it’s a disgusting thing and it’s being pushed, they have no witnesses, there’s nobody around,” Trump said at the rally in Greensboro, North Carolina.

“Some are doing it for probably a little fame, they get some free fame. It’s a total set-up.

trump video

Trump says allegations are ‘phony’. Photo: Getty

“Now suddenly after many, many years, phony accusers come out less than a month before one of the most important elections in the history of our country,” he said.

Trump has since intensified his attack, calling the women accusing him of sexual misconduct “sick” liars.

Trump released a statement denying Ms Zervos’ allegations, saying he “vaguely” remembered her “as one of the many contestants on The Apprentice over the years”.

“To be clear, I never met her at a hotel or greeted her inappropriately a decade ago. That is not who I am as a person, and it is not how I’ve conducted my life,” he said.

Trump’s White House campaign has been scrambling to recover from the release a week ago of a 2005 video in which he bragged about groping women and making unwanted sexual advances.

While Trump said the video was just talk and he had never behaved in this way, multiple women subsequently went public with allegations of sexual misconduct against the New York real estate magnate going back three decades.

Trump has denied the allegations, saying that The New York Times, which published two women’s claims, and other media, along with his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, are engaged in a vicious campaign to stop him from winning the November 8 election.

The Times reported on Wednesday that two women said they had endured unwanted groping or kisses from the former TV personality.

Several other women made allegations of sexual aggression by Trump in various media outlets following that report.

The Times said on Thursday it stood by its story and rejected charges the article was libelous after a lawyer for Trump threatened legal action and demanded a retraction.

Stay informed, daily
A FREE subscription to The New Daily arrives every morning and evening.
The New Daily is a trusted source of national news and information and is provided free for all Australians. Read our editorial charter
Copyright © 2024 The New Daily.
All rights reserved.