And why should I keep quiet?
Another woman speaks up about an encounter with Trump years ago. This one is an actual example of “grab her by the pussy.”
Kristin Anderson was deep in conversation with acquaintances at a crowded Manhattan nightspot and did not notice the figure to her right on a red velvet couch — until, she recalls, his fingers slid under her miniskirt, moved up her inner thigh, and touched her vagina through her underwear.
Sorry to interrupt, but I wish people would get the wording right. You can’t touch someone “on” the vagina – it’s not an “on” kind of thing, especially not through underwear. It’s an in, not an on. Genitals, crotch, vulva – even pussy, but not on the vagina.
Anderson shoved the hand away, fled the couch and turned to take her first good look at the man who had touched her, she said.
She recognized him as Donald Trump: “He was so distinctive looking — with the hair and the eyebrows. I mean, nobody else has those eyebrows.”
At the time of the incident, which Anderson said took place in the early 1990s, she was in her early twenties, trying to make it as a model. She was paying the bills by working as a makeup artist and restaurant hostess. Trump was a big celebrity whose face was all over the tabloids and a regular presence on the New York club scene.
The episode, as Anderson described it, lasted no more than 30 seconds. Anderson said she and her companions were “very grossed out and weirded out” and thought, “Okay, Donald is gross. We all know he’s gross. Let’s just move on.”
So they did. She told people about it over the years, but didn’t officially report it to anyone.
Anderson, who said she doesn’t support Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton, did not initially approach The Post. A reporter contacted her after hearing her story from a person who knew of it, and she spent several days trying to decide whether to go public.
Anderson’s decision to do so follows last week’s disclosure by The Washington Post of a 2005 video in which Trump boasted to “Access Hollywood” host Billy Bush that his celebrity gave him the ability to grab women “by the p—y. You can do anything.”
Trump insisted that his comments were “just words” and dismissed them as “locker room banter.”
Pressed about them in Sunday night’s debate against Clinton, Trump said that he had never done the things he had talked about, which would constitute sexual assault.
What Anderson described, however, is consistent with the behavior Trump described on the video.
It’s strikingly consistent with it. It’s not the more usual kind of harassment or assault – grabbing the more available, sticking-out bits. It’s actually “grabbing her by the pussy” and it’s startlingly crude and invasive.
“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, and nothing would happen,” Anderson said. “There was zero conversation. We didn’t even really look at each other. It was very random, very nonchalant on his part.”
It was an expression of contempt, basically.
I feel like Michelle Obama, all over again. Can you believe this terrible, trashy guy is a candidate for president?
Anderson said that she was particularly disturbed by the way the video caught Trump and Bush, who were aboard a bus, crudely discussing Arianne Zucker, an actress they spotted waiting to escort them onto a soap-opera set. Bush has since been suspended from his subsequent job as co-host of NBC’s “Today” show, and the network is reportedly negotiating his departure.
“I watched this woman — who could have been me; it could have been anyone — walk in and shake his hand,” Anderson said. “That was just nauseating, because she has no idea what she was walking into, and what could possibly happen to her. And that’s just wrong.”
Yes it is.
As Anderson agonized over whether to tell her story publicly, the New York Times reported the accounts of two women who said that Trump had groped them, and a People magazine reporter wrote a first-person story claiming that in December 2005 Trump pushed her against a wall and began “forcing his tongue down my throat.”
That decided it for Anderson.
“It’s a sexual assault issue, and it’s something that I’ve kept quiet on my own,” Anderson said. “And I’ve always kept quiet. And why should I keep quiet? Actually, all of the women should speak up, and if you’re touched inappropriately, tell somebody and speak up about it. Actually go to the authorities and press some charges. It’s not okay.”
…
Only in recent years did the incident with Trump start to take on larger meaning to her, Anderson said.
“Every once in awhile it [would] come up in a ‘remember the time when . . .’ conversation and we [would] have a moment of disgust,” she wrote in an email to a Post reporter as she considered going on the record. “It didn’t cross my mind then that this person was a predator.”
Now, she said, she sees that sort of behavior as a “gateway” to something worse.
A stranger “sort of groping you on the side, on the sly, like you’re some kind of stuffed animal on the couch. That’s really not okay, and it opens the door for much worse behavior on [his] part and for the girl, allowing worse things to happen to them because they feel that it’s inconsequential.”
“It’s really not nothing, and it sends an awful message to women that they’re nothing,” she added.
We see you, Donald. We see you.
So, Donald IS the clown scare!
McRonald should sue for damages. Pockets run deep.
I suspect more women would speak up if they didn’t see such a torrent of hate and abuse dished out to the women who did speak up. If the culture ever made it the man’s fault, and not the woman’s. If it didn’t ruin careers and lives to speak up.
Yes. Maybe an example cn be statuted here, of a mighty man brought down and counter-shamed into oblivion — or at least contrition? Except it’s doubtful if this particular specimen has the fibre for it. Anyway, his time is ripe.
“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, and nothing would happen,” Anderson said.
That’s a crucial point that gets overlooked in discussions of sexual assault. It’s not sexual. It only uses sex to be more of an assault. It’s done to feel power. When there’s more than one guy involved, it’s to stamp each other’s man cards. Note all the research coming out pointing out that it’s used for “male bonding.” It’s to feel the glow of being in the high status caste.
It doesn’t have anything to do with actual maleness or sex. The maleness is only a marker of caste. It’s being part of the powerful caste that’s the point.
It’s not really toxic masculinity. It’s toxic elites.
I’m sure TRUMP thinks it’s ‘masculinity.’
Apparently only normal human beings can perceive the toxicity.
Quixote – I’m always sceptical of the claim that sexual assaults are about violence not sex (while BDSM is about sex but not violence). I’ve read it in so many places, even criminal law textbooks and it’s pretty much a dictum in feminist thought but I’m not convinced. I think some people get sexually aroused by committing sexual assaults. I don’t think the feelings of power and domination are separate from the feelings of sexual arousal. For some people the element of violation adds an additional sexual thrill. That’s why it’s so common in porn. There would be no market for it if it didn’t turn people on.