Donald Trump Faces More Sexual Misconduct Accusers
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LOS ANGLES (CBSMiami) – Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump continued to rebuff allegations of sexual misconduct Friday, as more accusers came forward saying he touched them without their consent, including a former contestant on 'The Apprentice.'
Summer Zervos, who competed on the fifth season of his reality show, held a press conference Friday with her attorney Gloria Allred in Los Angeles. Zervos broke down as she talked about a meeting with Trump at the Beverly Hills Hilton in 2007 to discuss a possible job. She claims Trump tried to get her to lie down on a bed with him.
"He then asked me to sit next to him. I complied. He then grabbed my shoulder and began kissing me again very aggressively and placed his hand on my breast," said Zervos.
Also Friday, the Washington Post published an interview with Kristin Anderson. Anderson, now a 46-year-old photographer living in California, claimed Trump inappropriately groped her when he put his hand up her skirt in a crowded New York nightclub in the early 1990's when she was an aspiring model. She said she had never even met him.
"He did touch my vagina through my underwear, absolutely," Kristin Anderson said in a video interview on the newspaper's website. "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," she told the paper.
A writer for People magazine also wrote a detailed account of a 2005 incident in which she accused Trump of assaulting and forcing a kiss on her while she interviewed him and his wife, Melania Trump, at their Florida estate.
Trump said accusations of sexual misconduct against him are part of a plot to discredit him ahead of the election. He has angrily denounced the allegations saying they are all lies.
"I don't know who these people are. I look on television, I think it's a disgusting thing and it's being pushed, they have no witnesses, there's nobody around," Trump said at a rally in Greensboro, N.C.
"Some are doing it for probably a little fame, they get some free fame. It's a total set-up. Now suddenly after many, many years, phony accusers come out less than a month before one of the most important elections in the history of our country," he said. "The press can't write the kind of things they write which are lies, lies, lies. The stories are fabrications and false and the only thing I say is hopefully, hopefully, our patriotic movement will overcome this terrible deception," Trump said.
Trump's White House campaign is still trying to recover from the release of the 2005 hot-mic video with Billy Bush in which he bragged about groping women and making unwanted sexual advances while aboard an 'Access Hollywood' bus. While Trump said the video was just talk and he had never behaved in this way, multiple women subsequently went public with allegations of sexual misconduct against the New York real estate magnate going back three decades.
Trump has denied the allegations, saying that The New York Times, which published two women's claims, and other media, along with his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, are engaged in a vicious campaign to stop him from winning the Nov. 8 election.
The Times reported on Wednesday that two women said they had endured unwanted groping or kisses from the former TV personality. Several other women made allegations of sexual aggression by Trump in various media outlets following that report.
The Times said on Thursday it stood by its story and rejected charges the article was libelous after a lawyer for Trump threatened legal action and demanded a retraction.
On Friday, Trump's running mate Mike Pence said "evidence" was forthcoming that would disprove the accusers' allegations.
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