Last week, a self-described “Dem strategist” posted on X: “I have been told that Trump groped a minor at one of his donor dinners — and that there’s video.” The next day, Stacey Williams, a woman who briefly dated Jeffrey Epstein, went on CNN and accused former president Donald Trump of groping her at Trump Tower in front of Epstein in 1993. (CNN talked to three people with whom Williams discussed the alleged assault, and NBC News spoke with seven.) Also that day, the Daily Mail published an anonymous account of a woman who said second gentleman Doug Emhoff “slapped” her in 2012, backing up an earlier report of the allegations that were told secondhand. In a statement, the Trump campaign denied the allegation regarding Epstein, calling it a “fake story [that] was contrived by the Harris campaign” but did not respond to the social media swirl around the strategist’s message, perhaps because there was no accuser and no clear allegation. And while the Harris campaign had initially denied the story about Emhoff’s ex, telling Semafor, “any suggestion that he would or has ever hit a woman is false,” they declined to discuss the new firsthand allegations.
It’s the end of October during a presidential election, and both camps are lobbing should-be surprises at each other. Unlike the obvious grenades of previous cycles, such as the gut-dropping footage of Trump describing what he believes to be his right to “grab them by the pu--y” and the subsequent recoiling of the Republican Party, these new allegations seem to be less surprising because of the context in which they exist.
Women alleging unwanted sexual contact from Trump is so depressingly common that the public seems inured to new information, like finding out yet another ice sheet is melting during yet another once-in-a-100-years hurricane season. Trump’s accusers range from his deceased ex-wife, Ivana, who during a 1991 deposition accused Trump of rape (which she recanted) and who is now interred at one of his golf courses, to E. Jean Carroll, who was awarded $83.3 million in two sexual abuse and defamation cases, after a jury found in her favor and a judge ruled that her claim Trump had “raped” her was “substantially true.”
Williams, a retired model, alleges that Trump and Epstein smiled at each other while Trump’s “hands started moving, and they were on the side of my breasts, on my hips, back down to my butt.” (Epstein died by suicide in jail, while awaiting trial for charges of sex trafficking minors.) Williams’s account has similar elements to those from the previous 26 women who accused Trump of sexual impropriety: abrupt incursions into intimate physical spaces he apparently feels entitled to enter. (Trump has denied all the accusations.) It’s impossible to ignore the misogynistic, dehumanizing language Trump uses when he describes women: horseface, monster, dog, disgusting. (The campaign has had slightly more restraint than its surrogates regarding one vulgar term. Elon Musk’s pro-Trump PAC published then deleted a post referring to Kamala Harris as a C-word. Before Trump’s Sunday rally at Madison Square Garden, a staffer reportedly excised a joke in which comedian Tony Hinchcliffe was going to call Harris a “c-nt,” though not one in which Hinchcliffe referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”)
Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, Palm Beach, Florida, 1997.by Davidoff Studios/Getty Images.
The new rumors about Trump “groping a minor” have not been substantiated. Keith Edwards, the person who posted about the alleged video, did not respond to Vanity Fair’s request for comment, leaving many questions unanswered. How old was the alleged minor? What donor was hosting the event where the groping supposedly took place? During which election cycle did it happen? Who took the video and why haven’t they shared it publicly? How does Edwards know about it? As the Trump campaign pointed out, Edwards received a one-time $1,000 payment for social media work from the Democratic campaign in April of this year, according to an FEC filing. (The Harris campaign declined to comment.)
Similar allegations have been leveled at Trump in the past. Five Miss Teen USA contestants told Buzzfeed that Trump walked into a dressing room while teenagers were changing, and a Miss USA contestant told The New York Times he kissed her on the lips without consent when she was 21. But there’s also the so-called “pee tape”—an alleged incident in the Steele dossier in which Russian intelligence agents supposedly took footage of Trump watching sex workers urinate on each other at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton. The tape never materialized.
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