Does Anybody Care that Donald Assaults Women?

Morning Dispatch

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Stacey Williams, a writer, consultant, and former model, came forward with a detailed account of being sexually assaulted by Donald in 1993. Her allegation is particularly chilling because it was, as she describes it, a "twisted game" between Donald and Jeffrey Epstein with her being used as a pawn by both of them.

To refresh everybody’s memories, Epstein was charged in 2019 with sex trafficking of minors and sexually assaulting and abusing dozens of young girls over the course of many years. Donald considered him a very close friend.

According to Williams, Epstein brought her to Trump Tower and shortly after being introduced to Donald, he immediately grabbed her, “He put his hands all over my breasts. My waist. My butt. . . The hands were moving all over me, yet these two men were, like, smiling at one another and continuing on in their conversation.”

Sometime later, Donald sent Williams a postcard with a picture of Mar-a-Lago. On it, he wrote: "Stacey – Your home away from home. Love Donald."

The machine to discredit Ms. Williams has already been set in motion and the Trump campaign is following the usual playbook: claiming the allegations are politically motivated; accusing the Harris campaign of manufacturing them; denying the incident happened; and attacking the victim.

But this incident didn’t happen in a vacuum. There is a long series of allegations against Donald stretching back decades, as well as a pattern of his own behavior and comments that make Williams’ story devastatingly credible.

We've all heard the Hollywood Access tape on which Donald bragged about sexually assaulting women:

You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything.

In order to minimize the horrific import of his words, the campaign—and Donald’s wife—characterized it as "locker room talk," but we all know it was a confession.

The pattern, spanning decades, is as consistent as it is sickening: Jessica Leeds in the 1970s; Kristin Anderson and E. Jean Carroll in the 90s; Natasha Stoynoff in 2005; Alva Johnson in 2019—altogether, 26 women have come forward. Imagine how many other potential victims have not.

Time after time, Donald subjected women to unwanted kissing, groping, and sexual assault. If they came forward, he denied, attacked, and threatened to sue them. But he never filed any lawsuits because he knows discovery would destroy him.

This entire history has unfolded against the backdrop of the language Donald has used to talk about his own daughter, which suggests a wildly inappropriate obsession.

On The View in 2006: "If Ivanka weren't my daughter, perhaps I'd be dating her." In a 2015 Rolling Stone interview, he talked about her "beauty" and said, seemingly without any insight into how disturbing it was, "If I weren't happily married and, ya know, her father..."

A White House staffer reported that Donald regularly made sexual comments about Ivanka's breasts and ass, even speculating about what it would be like to have sex with her. John Kelly, his chief of staff, had to remind his boss repeatedly that Ivanka was his daughter.

We’re beginning to see where this obsession has lead. Just hours after the Williams allegations broke, Tucker Carlson, before introducing Donald at a rally, described America as a "bad little girl who needs a spanking" from "Daddy" Trump while the crowd chanted "Daddy's home." The sexualization of power over and violence against women isn't a bug in Donald's movement—it’s a feature and it’s being led by men like him and Carlson who are misogynists to their core.

To sum up, over four decades, twenty-six women have told strikingly similar stories of being assaulted by Donald. In the Access Hollywood tape Donald acknowledged that he assaults women and believes it is perfectly within his rights to do so. Since Ivanka was very young, Donald has sexualized and made overtly sexual comments about her. In 2023, a jury found Donald liable for the sexual abuse and defamation of E. Jean Carrol which the judge in the case described as rape.

His rallies are descending into disturbing displays of a patriarchal fantasy of the subjugation, infantilization, and sexualized punishment of women.

So the question is, does all of this—the history, the allegations, the patterns, the on-the-record evidence—make Stacey Williams' accusation more or less credible?

I know what I think.