Two women on Wednesday claimed to The New York Times that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump had in the past touched them inappropriately, claims which his campaign dismissed as “fiction”.
The two women spoke to the newspaper in the wake of the leaked 2005 video of him making lewd comments on women.
In the video Trump was heard boasting about touching women without permission, but when was asked in Sunday night’s debate whether he had actually done what he had boasted off, he emphatically declared, “No, I have not.”
One of the women who spoke to the Times, 74-year-old Jessica Leeds, said that more than three decades ago, when she was a traveling businesswoman at a paper company, she sat beside Trump in the first-class cabin of a flight to New York. They had never met before.
About 45 minutes after takeoff, she claimed, Trump lifted the armrest and began to touch her inappropriately, causing her to flee to the back of the plane.
Another woman, Rachel Crooks, told the newspaper that she was a 22-year-old receptionist at Bayrock Group, a real estate investment and development company in Trump Tower in Manhattan, when she encountered Trump outside an elevator in the building one morning in 2005.
Aware that her company did business with Trump, she turned and introduced herself, said Crooks. They shook hands, but Trump would not let go, she said. Instead, he began kissing her cheeks. Then, she said, he “kissed me directly on the mouth.”
Trump's campaign said in a statement quoted by Reuters that the New York Times report was "fiction."
"This entire article is fiction, and for the New York Times to launch a completely false, coordinated character assassination against Mr. Trump on a topic like this is dangerous," Trump campaign senior communications adviser Jason Miller said on Wednesday.