appeared yesterday in a McClatchy News article titled Miss Washington 2013 claims Donald Trump groped her, invited her to hotel room.
Somehow this has not risen to greater attention, in large part because of the speeches yesterday by Trump and both Obamas.
What is important about this story is that the woman did NOT come forth AFTER the release of the Access Hollywood tape. Note the timing in the snip below, which I will place in bold:
A contestant in the 2013 Miss USA pageant alleges that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump groped her and invited her back to his hotel room.
Cassandra Searles, Miss Washington 2013, wrote a Facebook post in June outlining a series of complaints about Trump’s behavior. In the post, she included a picture of Trump standing in the middle of all the pageant contestants and tagged many of her fellow competitors in the post.
So 2 key points
1. The alleged assault took place in 2013, not more than a decade ago, or thirty years ago
2. The person was complaining about Trump’s behavior well before the Access Hollywood tape came out.
On both counts, it is qualitatively different than the events that caused the most recent brouhaha when published in three different media outlets on Wednesday.
Let me note two other facts which I will share in snips:
Yahoo! reported in June that other contestants complaints about Trump in the comments.
Her story is at least in part confirmed by other participants in the event, which again, was 2013, and about which the confirmation was made months ago.
Then there is this article in Rolling Stone published this week, referred to in the McClatchy piece as follows:
In an article about Trump’s history with the pageant, Rolling Stone reported that Searles added a comment to her original post.
“He probably doesn’t want me telling the story about that time he continually grabbed my ass and invited me to his hotel room.”
Now I want to be careful. It is NOT clear from the Rolling Stone article when Searles added the comment in the block quote above. I have examined the Yahoo story linked above, the complete Rolling Stone article, and tried to found the original Facebook post without luck, so I cannot find the date of when the specific allegation of the assault/invitation occurred, so I want to be cautious.
There is however no doubt whatsoever of multiple women in the 2013 event at a minimum finding Trump’s behavior creepy, and being on record as such back in June.
The linked articles are useful sources of the patterns of behavior.
There is no doubt that Trump is a creep.
There is increasing evidence that he is a sexual predator.