Yuri Gripas/ZUMA
A former model has accused President Trump of forcibly kissing and groping her while attending the 1997 US Open in Queens, New York. The alleged incident is the latest in at least 24 credible sexual assault allegations against Trump, ranging from similar accusations of unwanted touching and kissing to rape.
Amy Dorris, who was 24 at the time, came forward to the Guardian with her account. She alleges that Trump assaulted her “all over her body” outside the bathroom to the tournament’s VIP box. Several people have corroborated Dorris’s account, according to the Guardian, including a friend she immediately confided to after the alleged incident took place and her therapist. Trump, through his lawyers, denied the allegation, in the “strongest possible terms.”
Dorris recalled to the Guardian:
“He just shoved his tongue down my throat and I was pushing him off. And then that’s when his grip became tighter and his hands were very gropey and all over my butt, my breasts, my back, everything.
“I was in his grip, and I couldn’t get out of it,” she said, adding: “I don’t know what you call that when you’re sticking your tongue just down someone’s throat. But I pushed it out with my teeth. I was pushing it. And I think I might have hurt his tongue.”
Doris said that she had kept silent out about the alleged assault out of concern for her family but chose to speak out now that her two twin daughters are older.
The allegation comes as the Justice Department, in a stunning and rare intervention earlier this month, moved to represent the president in his defense against the writer E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit against him. Last November, Carroll filed the suit after Trump denied her claims that he had raped her inside the dressing rooms of Bergdorf Goodman more than twenty years ago, and claimed that he had never met Carroll.
