‘She’s not my type’: Donald Trump says woman who claims he raped her in the 1990s is ‘totally lying’
- ‘It never happened. It never happened, OK?’ US president says, dismissing latest sexual misconduct claim against him
Trump made the comment in an interview with The Hill, a political news outlet, that touched on the allegations from E. Jean Carroll, who claims in her new book that the alleged rape occurred in the mid-1990s.
“I’ll say it with great respect: number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened. It never happened, OK?” Trump said in the interview, which was conducted in the Oval Office.
The president said Carroll was “totally lying” when she made her claims.
“I know nothing about this woman. I know nothing about her,” he said. “She is – it’s just a terrible thing that people can make statements like that.”
She said in a chance encounter at the Bergdorf Goodman store in Manhattan, Trump – a property developer at the time – asked her for advice on buying lingerie for an unnamed woman.
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Then jokingly, he suggested she should try some on.
“The moment the dressing-room door is closed, he lunges at me, pushes me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and puts his mouth against my lips,” wrote Carroll, who works for Elle magazine.
Pinning her against the wall, Carroll claims, Trump proceeded to pull down her tights, unzip his trousers and penetrate her – all while he was fully dressed – until she finally managed to push him away and run from the dressing room.
On Monday, Carroll told CNN he “just went at it” after he cornered her.
Carroll never went to the police because, she said, she was afraid of repercussions.
“I wanted to forget it,” she said. “I thought A, my fault. B, I was stupid. C, I didn’t think of it … as rape. I thought of it as a violent incident. I thought of it as a fight.”
“With all the 15 women or 16 who have come forward, it’s the same. He denies it. He turns it around. He attacks. And he threatens.”
She told CNN’s Anderson Cooper: “I love that … I’m so glad I am not his type.”
The “not my type” remark isn’t the first time Trump has disparaged an accuser.
In 2016, after a former magazine writer accused Trump of assaulting her in 2005, he responded: “She lies! Look at her, I don’t think so.”
And when another woman claimed Trump groped her on an aeroplane in the early 1980s, he said, “Believe me – she would not be my first choice.”
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According to CNN, the story about Carroll’s rape claim was deleted from the New York Post’s website on the orders of the newspaper’s editor Col Allan.
Allan, a former New York Post editor-in-chief and top Rupert Murdoch lieutenant, is said to have returned to the paper to make it more friendly to the president.
The Post had published a staff-written story about the alleged attack. The paper did not immediately respond to a request from New York Daily News for comment about the article’s disappearance.
People who clicked on search engine links pointing to the story were sent to an error page.
Additional reporting by Associated Press, Tribune News Service