President Donald Trump is facing a new series of sexual assault allegations after an excerpt from a forthcoming book was released on Wednesday. All the President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator contains many detailed accusations, including one that happened at his Mar-a-Lago resort.
A woman named Karen Johnson told authors Barry Levine and Monique El-Faizy that Trump groped and tried to kiss her at a New Year’s Eve party at the Florida resort in the early 2000s. She was attending the party with her husband and a relative.
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“Shortly after glittering balloons fell from the ceiling at the stroke of midnight, her husband said he wasn’t feeling well and the relative was ready to go. Johnson decided to make a quick trip to the restroom before they headed home,” the excerpt reads. “‘I hadn’t seen [Trump] that whole entire night,’ said Johnson, who was in her late thirties at the time. ‘I was just walking to the bathroom. I was grabbed and pulled behind a tapestry, and it was him. And I’m a tall girl and I had six-inch heels on, and I still remember looking up at him. And he’s strong, and he just kissed me,’ she recounted to us. ‘I was so scared because of who he was. … I don’t even know where it came from. I didn’t have a say in the matter.’”
Johnson joins 22 other women who have made on-the-record accusations of sexual assault against Trump. Many women came forward in 2016 after the infamous hot mic recording of the president bragging about groping women.
“When he says that thing, ‘Grab them in the p—,’ that hits me hard because when he grabbed me and pulled me into the tapestry, that’s where he grabbed me,” she told Levine and El-Faizy.
She says that Trump somehow got her phone number and harassed her in the days following the incident and tried to get her to fly to New York to see him. Johnson also claims that he offered to send a car to bring her to Mar-a-Lago when he was in Florida. Eventually the calls stopped.
A note before the excerpt says that this is just one of dozens of new claims. “While the president has publicly faced allegations from two dozen women, this book reveals another 43 allegations of alleged inappropriate behavior, including 26 instances of unwanted sexual contact.”
