Donald Trump's ex-girlfriend "very upset" about New York Times story
Rowanne Brewer Lane, the woman featured in the opening anecdote in Saturday's New York Times article about Donald Trump's treatment of women, says the piece was "very upsetting" and objected to the way her relationship was portrayed by the Times.
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Brewer Lane appeared on "Fox and Friends" Monday morning to refute much of what the article said about her experience with the presumed GOP nominee.
"I did not have a negative experience with Donald Trump," Brewer Lane told Fox News, and, she added, "I don't appreciate" the Times "making it look like...I was saying it was a negative experience, because it was not."
The Times article began, "Donald J. Trump had barely met Rowanne Brewer Lane when he asked her to change out of her clothes." It went on to say that Trump, in the midst of divorcing his first wife, asked the then-26-year-old Brewer Lane to change.
"He took me into a room and opened drawers and asked me to put on a swimsuit," the article reads.
And then, the Times says that he showed her off to the crowd at Mar-a-Lago with the words, "That is a stunning Trump girl, isn't it?"
Brewer Lane told Fox News that she was in fact "flattered," not insulted, and said that the Time reporters "spun it completely differently."
Her version of the anecdote suggests that Trump's gesture was an offer for her to accept or reject. She says she told Trump she hadn't planned to swim, but "he asked me if I had a swimsuit, and I said I didn't. I didn't know that I'd plan to -- wasn't really going to plan on swimming -- and he asked me if I wanted one."
When she returned to the pool party, Brewer Lane said, "He made a comment, 'Now that's a stunning Trump girl right there.' I was actually flattered...I didn't feel like it was a demeaning situation or comment at all."
Michael Barbaro, the Times reporter who interviewed Brewer Lane, told "CBS This Morning," "I recall in my interview with her that she expressed some -- she basically said was taken aback by this -- and I think that's how we depicted it, and I think people can evaluate the story...on its own merits."
Brewer Lane ended up dating Trump for several months and asserted that there was never a moment when she felt demeaned by him.
"He never offended me in anyway. He was very gracious, I saw him around all types of people, all types of women," she told Fox News. "He was very kind, thoughtful, generous, he was a gentleman."
Trump tweeted about Brewer Lane's interview soon after it aired on Fox News.
His earliest tweets misspelled her name as "Rosanne" instead of "Rowanne," but those tweets appear to have been deleted.
Times reporter Megan Twohey, who shares the byline with Barbaro on the story, said that the story isn't just Brewer Lane's -- it's that of many women over the years.
"We really wanted to highlight these voices, and so you know, we gave these women, you know, very large chunks of space to...explain their story in their own words," Twohey said, also on "CBS This Morning."