 "Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at the Polish National Alliance. Photo:AP|PTI")
Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump on Friday charged that the women accusing him of sexual misconduct fabricated their stories to damage his campaign after two more women came forward with allegations that he had groped them, reported Reuters.
The new accusations, according to the report, were made by a contestant on his reality TV show The Apprentice, who cited a 2007 incident, and by a woman who described an incident from the early 1990s.
The allegations
The latest accusations against 70-year-old Trump come just days after a 2005 video surfaced of him in which he is talking in lewd and sexually explicit terms about women and bragging about groping them and getting away with it because he was a "star".
Summer Zervos, who competed on the fifth season of The Apprentice in 2006, appeared at a news conference with celebrity attorney Gloria Allred in Los Angeles, saying Trump kissed her, touched her breast and tried to get her to lie down on a bed with him during a meeting about a possible job, according to the Reuters report.
"He put me in an embrace and I tried to push him away. I pushed his chest to put space between us and I said, 'Come on man, get real.' He repeated my words back to me, 'Get real,' as he began thrusting his genitals," Zervos said.
Zervos said she thought Trump was going to take her to dinner to discuss a job, but the meeting took place in his bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
The New York Times reported two women's detailed accounts of Trump groping them. There was a similar account from another woman in the Palm Beach Post. Former Apprentice contestant Jennifer Murphy and People magazine writer Natasha Stoynoff also levelled similar allegations against him.
Jessica Leeds, 74, said Trump had groped her when the two were seated next to each other on a flight more than three decades ago.
Rachel Crooks, who worked for a firm based in Trump Tower in 2005, found herself in a lift with Trump and tried to introduce herself by shaking his hand. The Apprentice star kissed Crooks, then 22, "directly on the mouth", she told the New York Times.
Mindy McGillivray, 36, told the Palm Beach Post that she was groped by Trump during a party at his Florida property Mar-a-Lago 13 years ago, while Murphy told Grazia that Trump had kissed her on the lips at the end of a 2005 job interview.
In a lengthy account published late last night, Stoynoff recalled travelling to Mar-a-Lago to interview Trump and his wife Melania, in 2005. Trump, she claimed, had cornered her in private and "within seconds, he was pushing me against the wall, and forcing his tongue down my throat".
The women came forward to tell their stories after Sunday's presidential debate in which Trump denied having ever sexually assaulted women.
Trump's defence is that his accusers are not 'attractive'
Trump has spent more and more time at his rallies denying allegations of groping since a video from 2005 became public a week ago showing him bragging about groping and making unwanted sexual advances. On Friday, in addition to his denials, he suggested that he never would have found two of the women who have made allegations attractive, added the Reuters report.
Trump also released a statement denying allegations of unwanted sexual advances made by Zervos.
"I vaguely remember Zervos 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," Trump said, adding, "That is not who I am as a person, and it is not how I've conducted my life."
At his last event of the day on Friday, in Charlotte, Trump suggested that his accusers were fabricating their stories for publicity or to damage his campaign. "It's not hard to find a small handful of people willing to make false smears," he said.
The Trump campaign condemned Stoynoff's story as "fabricated" and the New York Times piece as "fiction" and "a completely false, coordinated character assassination", according to media reports.
Trump's lawyers threatened to sue the New York Times. Trump on Thursday angrily denied several accusations of groping in a growing controversy over inappropriate behaviour with women. Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, the New York Times and other media were engaged in a concerted, "vicious" attempt to stop him, Trump told a rally in West Palm Beach, Florida. "These claims are all fabricated. They're pure fiction and they're outright lies. These events never, ever happened," Trump said, adding he would make public at some point evidence to dispute the claims. "These vicious claims about me of inappropriate conduct with women are totally and absolutely false. And the Clintons know it and they know well."
