This story has been updated to include a comment from the Trump campaign. See below.
Donald Trump’s past behavior towards women keeps coming back to haunt him.
On Tuesday, Jill Harth, the woman who sued Trump in 1997, alleging “attempted rape,” spoke to The Guardian after keeping quiet about her experience for nearly 20 years.
Harth, who now works as a makeup artist, alleges that the GOP nominee tried to rape her in January 1993 while she was visiting his Mar-a-Lago estate with her then-romantic partner to celebrate a business deal.
“He pushed me up against the wall, and had his hands all over me and tried to get up my dress again,” Harth told The Guardian. “And I had to physically say: ‘What are you doing? Stop it.’ It was a shocking thing to have him do this because he knew I was with [my partner] George, he knew they were in the next room. And how could he be doing this when I’m there for business?”
And Trump’s pursuit of her didn’t end there, she recalled. After the assault, “Trump did everything in his power to get me to leave [my partner]. He constantly called me and said: ‘I love you, baby, I’m going to be the best lover you ever had. What are you doing with that loser, you need to be with me, you need to step it up to the big leagues.’”
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The reason Harth has decided to speak up now, she explained, is that she is angry with how Trump’s campaign has branded her a liar and called her suit “meritless.”
“He didn’t have to say anything,” Harth said. “For once, he should have closed his mouth. He didn’t have to comment…What is happening now is of his own making, OK? I was quiet.”
While she said it would be nice to get an apology from the billionaire, she doesn’t expect one. “But he really should have been taught, if you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say anything, OK? Don’t call me a liar.”
Hope Hicks, the Trump campaign’s press secretary, wrote in an email to Coins2Day that Harth “obviously has a serious credibility issue and her motives are highly questionable. There is no truth to these claims and it is unfortunate that we need to respond to these false accusations.”
