Another day, another very plausible sexual assault allegation against Donald Trump. On Friday, the Washington Post reported that a woman named Kristin Anderson alleged that Trump “slid [his fingers] under her miniskirt, moved up her inner thigh, and touched her vagina through her underwear” while she was at a Manhattan nightclub in the 1990s.
Anderson says she was sitting on a red velvet couch, engaged in a conversation with friends, when this happened. When she fled the couch and turned around, she says she saw that it was Trump. “He was so distinctive looking—with the hair and the eyebrows. I mean, nobody else has those eyebrows,” she told the Post.
“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, and nothing would happen,” Anderson said. “There was zero conversation. We didn’t even really look at each other. It was very random, very nonchalant on his part.”
Anderson, who is now 46, was in her 20s at the time of the alleged incident. Over the years she has told multiple friends about it, but only decided to come forward after a slew of sexual assault allegations against Trump emerged following the release of a video tape in which he boasted about how he would kiss women and “grab them” by the vagina and escape opprobrium or punishment for it it because of his fame.
A friend of Anderson’s, Kelly Stedman, told the Post that Anderson was telling the story to friends days after it happened. More from the Post:
“We were out at a girls’ brunch” at the Great Jones Cafe in Manhattan, Stedman said, recalling that when she and two other friends heard the story, they found themselves “laughing at how pathetic it was” on Trump’s part.
Anderson said she lived in New York City from 1991 until 2008. Brad Trent, a New York photographer, said he heard the story about Trump from Anderson at a dinner with a group of people in March 2007.
“It was just girls saying stories about how they got hit on by creepy old guys,” Trent said of the conversation around the table. “That’s when I found out about it.”
As with the other allegations against him, Trump’s campaign claimed that the woman making the charge was lying.
“Mr. Trump strongly denies this phony allegation by someone looking to get some free publicity. It is totally ridiculous,” Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks told the Post in an emailed statement.
Anderson couldn’t recall what club it was, but said she found an old photo of the China Club—a famed Manhattan night spot that Trump regularly visited at the time—with the sort of couch she remembers having been sitting on when the alleged attack occurred.
The paper reported that Anderson was approached by the Post, did not come forward on her own, and that she agonized over whether to tell her story only reaching her decision after a series of allegations of similar behavior by Trump were reported by other women and they were described as liars by the Trump campaign.
Anderson also said the moment in the now infamous 2005 video when Trump was discussing possibly kissing actress Arianne Zucker without her consent right before meeting her particularly disturbed Anderson and caused her to want to come forward.
“I watched this woman—who could have been me; it could have been anyone—walk in and shake his hand,” she told the Post. “That was just nauseating, because she has no idea what she was walking into, and what could possibly happen to her. And that’s just wrong.”
Anderson, who told the Post she doesn’t support Trump or Hillary Clinton, switched her voter registration from Democrat to “no party preference” in May.
