Sexual assaulters love Donald Trump. And why wouldn’t they? He’s clearly their man. He’s normalized their behavior and since a significant portion of the American population chose to vote for a serial predator even though he admitted, on tape, to grabbing women by their private parts without their consent, they don’t have a need to feel any real shame. They love him so much, they even came to Washington to celebrate his inauguration. John Joseph Boswell, a millionaire from Florida, was in town celebrating the swearing in of the new Groper-In-Chief when he decided that he liked the look of the maid who was hard at work cleaning his room. And without her consent, he proceeded to touch her.
On Jan. 19, as the nation’s capital swelled with tourists and protesters, the millionaire and the maid met on the 10th floor of the Mayflower Hotel downtown, in Room 1065.
As she made his bed, he approached from behind and began rubbing her buttocks, according to a police report.
“This is very nice stuff,” he said, according to the report. “I like that!” [...]
She froze and, in shock, apologized to him, according to the police report. “Sorry sir,” she said. “Sorry sir!”
The woman cleaning the room was an African immigrant. She makes $20 an hour. In DC that’s a fairly high wage (though the cost of living is incredibly high too) so you can imagine she was likely terrified about causing any kind of trouble that would cause her to lose her job. Frightened, she ran off. When another maid entered the room to clean it, you’d think perhaps that Boswell might have learned his lesson. Except that’s not how predators think. Especially not the ones like Trump—the very ones who think that when they are rich and famous, women let them do anything, like “grab them by the pu**y”. So he tried it again.
As the second maid attempted to make the bed, Boswell approached her, too, and “placed his hand on the top of her shoulder” until she ordered him to sit down, according to the police report.
Neither woman reported the incident. But the next day, when a co-worker told a manager what had happened, police were called.
This story ends with Boswell pleading guilty to misdemeanor sexual abuse in D.C. Superior Court. He will not, however, see any jail time as he received a sentence of 10 days incarceration, a $50 fine and six months probation—of which the jail time was suspended. He also is allowed to travel out of the country during his probation. Last month, he was permitted to travel on vacation to the Bahamas and heads to the Dominican Republic later this month. So that’s no jail time for thinking you are entitled to someone else’s body and grabbing, not one but two, women without permission. Terrifying these women who will likely never feel safe in their place of employment again. Meanwhile, his legal team actually scared one of the victims so much during a visit to her apartment that she actually moved. So for a sex offender, Boswell made out pretty sweet in this deal. This is yet another way the system fails victims of assault and rewards assaulters.
Boswell is the chief executive of Independent Stave Company, the world’s largest wine-and-whiskey barrel manufacturer. He lives in a 14,000-square-foot, $7 million mansion in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., 20 miles from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
Boswell — who has contributed more than $120,000 to Republican candidates and conservative groups over the past 25 years — wasn’t always a Trump backer. In the 2016 presidential election, he supported Ben Carson and Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.). But by the time of Trump’s inauguration, Boswell had embraced the new president and booked a room at the Mayflower.
Though he plead guilty, Boswell doesn’t even think he did anything wrong. Imagine that.
In an interview with The Post, Boswell maintained his innocence.
“I patted her on the lower back,” said Boswell, 70, who is married and has three young children. “It was just a friendly gesture.”
Companies need to figure out how to protect hotel housekeepers from this kind of abuse. And, as a country, we desperately need to figure out how to make sexual assault wrong again. Of course for a great many of us, it always was and remains so. But with Donald Trump in office, many of these sexual assaulters feel they have a pass to grope women whenever and wherever they feel like it.