WASHINGTON (TIP): Several women have come forward over the past 24 hours to accuse Donald Trump of pawing or groping them over the years, even as new polls show Hillary Clinton surging to a 15-point lead among women — enough to sink him at the polls.
The Trump campaign and its conservative support base, including the right wing media, has trashed the charges, dismissing them as “fabrications” by the liberal media, but coming on the heels of Trump’s own bragging on a hot mic of assaulting women, the allegations are widely seen as credible. “He was like an octopus, his hands were everywhere,” Jessica Leeds, one of he women who claimed to be at the wrong end of Trump’s attention told the New York Times. Now 74, Leeds said Trump began pawing her on a flight in 1980 and described how she bolted from the first class cabin to the back of the plane to escape him. Leeds, and Rachel Crooks, another woman who related a similar experience to NYT when she was a 22-year old receptionist in a realty firm, said they did not make a hue and cry about it because such behavior considered normal in that era, but they told family and friends about it immediately, something the paper confirmed.
Even as the NYT story was splashing through social media, more women — including a journalist — came forward with similar charges, shaking the Trump campaign to its foundation. Meanwhile, another videotape surfaced of a Trump interview in 1992 in which he is heard boasting that he is going to be dating a girl who was only about ten then in another ten years. At the time Trump was in his mid-40s and had been divorced from his first wife, Ivanka, and was dating Marla Maples, who was to become his second wife. The footage shows Trump asking a young girl: “Are you going up the escalator?” while both are out of view.