Welcome to DU! The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards. Join the community: Create a free account Support DU (and get rid of ads!): Become a Star Member All Forums Issue Forums Culture Forums Alliance Forums Region Forums Support Forums Help & Search

demmiblue

(36,751 posts)
Wed Oct 9, 2019, 12:11 PM Oct 2019

Donald Trump Allegedly Hid Behind a Tapestry to Grope a Woman at Mar-a-Lago in the Early 2000s

In an exclusive excerpt from All the President’s Women, Karen Johnson, one of 43 women with new allegations against the president, tells her story.

If you thought the Access Hollywood tape was the opening salvo in the story of Donald Trump's transgressions against women, think again. In All the President's Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator, journalists Barry Levine and Monique El-Faizy draw on over 100 interviews, many of them exclusive, to craft a detailed history of Trump's relationships with women, stretching back to his childhood and education as well as his rise through real estate, entertainment, and politics. What emerges from the authors' reporting is a portrait of a predator who hides behind wealth and institutional power to frequently harass and abuse women.

While the president has publicly faced allegations from two dozen women, this book reveals another 43 allegations of alleged inappropriate behavior, including 26 instances of unwanted sexual contact. In this exclusive excerpt from All the President's Women, Levine and El-Faizy investigate an alleged wave of unwanted touching that preceded his proposal to Melania Knauss, including a disturbing instance of groping at Mar-a-Lago. —Adrienne Westenfeld

In 1998, Sam Mendes packed the old Henry Miller Theater at Forty-Third Street and Broadway with round black cabaret chairs and tables dotted with red tasseled table lamps and installed banquettes and a bar, thus transforming it into the Kit Kat Club for the second Broadway revival ofCabaret, a musical about the rise of Nazis in 1930s Germany. “It’s rough, it’s dirty, it’s in your face,” Mendes said of the new Weimar-styled nightclub-cum-cabaret-cum-theater. Perhaps fittingly, it was there that Donald Trump, who would eventually have his own political rise, met an inscrutable twenty-eight-year-old brunette with steel-blue eyes who would be the star of the second revival of his role as married man.

The third Broadway staging of Cabaret was a huge hit and opened the door to Mendes’s career as a film director—and it seems Trump has had success his third time around as well. In Melania Knauss, he found his best match, a woman who seemed to combine first wife Ivana’s Eastern European love of a strongman with second wife Marla Maples’s homey attitude.

Donald Trump is a creature of habit, and the story of how he met the Slovenian model Knauss rings familiar. In 1998, when he had been separated from Maples for about a year, he went to the Kit Kat Club for a party for a Victoria’s Secret model with Norwegian heiress Celina Midelfart, who was in her mid-twenties and living in Trump Tower while studying at New York University, as his date. According to Trump’s account, he was meant to be introduced to another model that night, but Melania caught his eye. “I went crazy,” he told Larry King during an interview the CNN host conducted with newlyweds Donald and Melania in 2005. “There was this great supermodel sitting next to Melania. I was supposed to meet this supermodel. They said, ‘Look, there’s so and so.’ I said, “Forget about her. Who is the one on the left?’ And it was Melania.” Melania was twenty-eight at the time and had been invited to the party by her friend and agent, Paolo Zampolli. When Midelfart absented herself to use the restroom, Trump seized the opportunity to hit on Melania.

After chatting her up, Trump asked Melania for her number, but she refused to give it to him, asking for his instead. She was impressed when he gave her all his numbers—the office, Mar-a-Lago, all of it, she later told Harper’s Bazaar. Their courtship began with a few dinners together in New York. It didn’t take more than a month before she was boarding his private jet to fly to Mar-a-Lago.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a29391247/donald-trump-assault-allegations-karen-johnson-all-the-presidents-women-book/
6 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
Highlight: NoneDon't highlight anything 5 newestHighlight 5 most recent replies
Donald Trump Allegedly Hid Behind a Tapestry to Grope a Woman at Mar-a-Lago in the Early 2000s (Original Post) demmiblue Oct 2019 OP
Ew brucefan Oct 2019 #1
I don't like to think about Trump and sex in the same moment. The Velveteen Ocelot Oct 2019 #2
A perverted Polonius? n/t Harker Oct 2019 #3
But didn't he get stabbed? The Velveteen Ocelot Oct 2019 #4
Whilst concealed behind the arras, yes. Harker Oct 2019 #5
Groper in chief Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin Oct 2019 #6

The Velveteen Ocelot

(115,280 posts)
2. I don't like to think about Trump and sex in the same moment.
Wed Oct 9, 2019, 12:25 PM
Oct 2019

Even if he wasn't a serial assaulter the whole idea makes me

Latest Discussions»Issue Forums»Editorials & Other Articles»Donald Trump Allegedly Hi...