Preface. This is a book review of “All the President’s Women: Donald Trump and the making of a Predator”. Trump is clearly as much a sexual predator as Jeffrey Epstein (who he hung out with for a long time) and Harvey Weinstein. I was so disgusted and angry I only got half way through the book. How could any woman, or man for that matter, vote for such a bullying, brutal, nasty man? Below are some excerpts.
Related: Video Trump–is the president a Sex Pest? BBC
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report
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Levine, B. 2019. All the President’s Women: Donald Trump and the making of a Predator. Hachette Books.
“You know, it doesn’t really matter what the media write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.” —DONALD TRUMP, 1991, ESQUIRE INTERVIEW
By June 2019, news organizations had documented as many as 24 women who have accused Donald Trump of varying degrees of inappropriate behavior, including sexual harassment or sexual assault. Our investigation found at least 67 separate accusations of inappropriate behavior, including 26 instances of unwanted sexual contact.
Making unwanted physical advances became a Trump trademark, according to many women, and one that has continued to define him. The accounts span nearly four decades and bear a striking resemblance to one another. Reading them in the aggregate, patterns emerge. Forcible kissing. Groping. Genital grabbing. Barging in on sleeping women. And, all too often, an utter indifference to women’s volition or boundaries.
The behavior he has admitted to—grabbing women by the “pussy”—and many of the credible accusations he denies, were they to be proven in a court of law, would qualify as crimes, some of them serious ones.
After considering all the evidence, one cannot but conclude that Donald Trump is, and has been for some time, a full-blown sexual predator.
Models
At the beginning of Trump’s club life he was out every night meeting women. “You had drugs, women, and booze all over the fuckin’ place,” Michael Gross quoted Trump as saying in his book My Generation: Fifty Years of Sex, Drugs, Rock, Revolution, Glamour, Greed, Valor, Faith, and Silicon Chips. Having sex became his “second business.
“The other girls were obviously afraid of him, like they knew he meant it and it wasn’t a joke,” she said. Given the nature of the modeling business, where bikini and lingerie shoots and quick changes at fashion shows are the norm, models are used to being seen when they are wearing very little. For models to be upset about being seen in their underwear, something has to be seriously amiss,
Carr said she and her model friends would see him out in Manhattan all the time in those days. “He was nearly always there, especially any party at Studio 54 or the Plaza, he was there. And he always had his sights set on very young women,” she said. The soirees that Trump attended during that era were guaranteed to have two elements, according to Carr: young models and cocaine—lots of it. “It generally wasn’t done in the open, but it was rampant.
According to interviews conducted for this book with dozens of people in the modeling world who are familiar with his behavior, Trump had a reputation for never missing an opportunity to meet models. “Trump would be at every model party. Many said that he was a model hound. He was always chasing models.… He was a predator. Absolutely. And he could be intimidating.
One night in the mid- to late-1990s Webber was out at Life, a trendy club on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village where modeling agencies often held parties. Trump was there, and Webber noticed that a young girl couldn’t get away from him. Webber didn’t know the girl personally, but had seen her at a casting. He believes she could have been as young as 14, he said, and was probably not older than 16. “Our faces met across the room and she mouthed ‘Help’ at me,” he said. “Trump had her pinned against a wall—not physically pinned, but he had surrounded her with his bigness, if you like. He had one hand on the wall to one side and she was against the wall.” Webber moved in to aid her. “I went there and I stepped right in between them with my back to him and grabbed her and said, ‘Oh, there you are, I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’ And I dragged her off into the next room, and she was like, ‘Thank you, thank you.’
Trump seemed none too pleased by the interruption. Later, when Webber was leaving the club, the bouncers, whom he knew, told him that Trump had given them money to beat him up.
Trump was a known type. “I would compare him to the spectrum of model fuckers,” Michael Gross, the author of the bestselling book Model, told us. “The spectrum of model fuckers runs from guy with no money to wealthy guys. And they’re collectors of baubles, they’re trophy hunters.… To some extent, they can be described as predators because they’re not actually going out and looking for a woman; they’re going out collecting, using, and discarding models.” These model-idolizing men may or may not end up sleeping with the women they pursue, but that’s not what it’s really about for many of them. The models are status symbols. “A lot of these guys, they don’t actually have sex with the girls. They just want to be with them to impress other men,” Gross said.
“With some of the girls he pursued, it was an attention-getting thing. You know, ‘Look at me. Look at the young girl I have on my arm.’ I mean, everyone knew he was married, but it didn’t matter to him.
Trump would sometimes call a friend at one of the agencies and ask him to send specific girls to see his doctor so he could make sure they didn’t have any STDs, sources inside the modeling industry told us.
“We all have the clear impression that Donald was having sex with these girls, but it was more about the boast—my building is taller, my car is longer, my apartment is older, and my women are prettier and have bigger tits,” Gross told us.
“He was gropey.… he had his hands in the most inappropriate places, always,” Carr said. “When he went in to kiss someone, the hand always went to either the hip or the butt. He was also really good when he did pictures or when he’d side-hug someone. He’d always get his hand on the boob. Every time.” Stories about Trump and his hands circulated within the modeling community. At one modeling event, Trump allegedly went down a line of women feeling their bodies to guess their dress size. Backstage at a lingerie show, he is said to have moved his hands all over a model’s breasts under the guise of inspecting the bra’s fabric.
“I saw this several times: When he met a girl, he’d immediately move in to kiss her, not shake her hand or say ‘Hello, how are you?’ He’d immediately put his mouth on her,” Carr said. “I saw him many times go straight to the mouth, to kiss them on the mouth,
Among modeling insiders, Trump had a reputation at the time for preferring the younger girls. “If you’re over twenty-one you don’t have to worry,” Carr said she was told.
Panagrosso said it’s often difficult for models to stand up for themselves. “It’s psychological manipulation because these men will put these women up against each other,” she said. “It’s like they are the prize to be won and these women will do everything to be selected by the men.” The imbalance of power skews the dynamic. “The women are usually intimidated, and in their minds—Trump and Weinstein—they believe they have the permissions to do what they want,” she said. “The women are afraid to say no.… When you have a predator, a guy with so much power… women caved in.
Pilling eventually excused herself to go to the restroom, where yet another girl was talking about the developer. “She said he grabbed her ass and kept going for her and was all hands.
“It was kind of like a feeding frenzy and the girls were there as consumables,” a fashion industry insider told BBC’s Panorama for the documentary “Trump: Is the President a Sex Pest?
The point of the parties was to “get laid,” he said. “We do know that [Trump] was having sex with [the models] because the next day or days after we’d hear about it,” the insider said. “He’d brag about it to his friends that he scored, maybe one or two girls at a time, which is what he loved to do.
While the BBC documentary on Trump and women found no conclusive evidence that Trump had sex with underage girls, it reported that Trump attended small social gatherings with models who were not yet adults.
The girls were asked to walk one by one down a staircase and dance in front of Trump and Casablancas, who were seated in chairs at the bottom. “It was a very small area and I could see them laughing and making fun of the girls,” most of whom were 15 and 16 years old, she said in an interview for this book. “You know, these men were older than my father at the time, looking girls up and down and objectifying them. It was just kind of gross. I don’t think doing that had anything to do with being a professional model.
Dressing rooms weren’t the only places where Trump barged in on women. In the early 1990s, a world-famous supermodel had flown to New York to attend a fashion event and was staying in a suite at the Plaza hotel. She was seeing another industry insider and they had gone back to her room. The two were in bed together when they heard the door open, according to the man, who gave an interview for this book requesting anonymity because both he and the supermodel still work in the industry and fear retribution. Thinking it was housekeeping, the pair sat up in bed and hollered that they didn’t need anything. A few seconds later, the door to the bedroom opened. “It’s Donald standing there,” the man said in his interview. Trump had let himself in. The supermodel and her companion were stunned. “I said, ‘What the hell are you doing?’” the man said. “We’re naked, so she pulled up the covers and we’re freaked out. I couldn’t believe it. He looks in the room and he took a good look at both of us and he slammed the door really hard, like in anger.
Trump sometimes hunted as part of a pack. He walked into a big room where there were about 50 models.
Braden and her friends found the party odd. There was no DJ, no food, and no bartender
And then down this large staircase, in front of all of us, there was Donald Trump and behind him there were three actors, forties, maybe fifties. I don’t want to name them because they’re all still around.” The actors were famous, she said. “They came down the stairs and spread out like sharks among the girls,
Ask enough and somebody will say yes,” she said. “We were just pieces of meat.
The foreign women “ were more desperate than us because they were younger and they were controlled by the agents, who controlled their visas, who controlled their money. They had nothing to go back to,
Braden said that the younger models were likely easier quarry for Trump because they didn’t know his reputation. Among the older girls, “he was just known as a pig, to be honest. No one ever liked him who I had ever met. Everyone just took advantage of him and the money he was willing to spend to be there.
When Braden heard about the Access Hollywood tape in 2016, she laughed in recognition. “I’m shocked there’s not hundreds [of tapes],” she said. Trump’s behavior was widely known about, but his power rendered people fearful to talk about it. “They’d have to be hundreds of victims,” Braden said. “Everybody knows. I have lots of connections about him, everybody is terrified of him, have had their lives ruined, or are afraid they’ll be sued by him.
And some women, Braden said, just don’t want to dredge up the painful memories of being the victim of a predatory man. There’s another reason more women don’t come forward, however, another open secret of the modeling industry. Many of the women took money to have sex with the men.
Trump’s social circle in the early 1990s included Jeffrey Epstein, a registered sex offender who allegedly ran a sex ring of underage girls. He pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting a minor and in July 2019 was charged with two federal counts of sex trafficking before being found dead in his prison cell in an apparent suicide in August. Trump was friends with him and once said of Epstein: “Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.
“All these men were out trying to lure [models], get with them. It was a predatory world in a predatory market where young girls were preyed upon by these rich men,” Braden said. “Trump, these types of men, are predators, exploiters. They are essentially traffickers. They’re essentially passing girls among each other. We were used as bargaining chips, for sure.
According to a lawsuit, which was later dropped, Trump, too, had a penchant for young girls. On April 26, 2016, a woman using the alias “Katie Johnson” filed a civil lawsuit in California against Trump alleging that he raped her in 1994 at a party in Epstein’s Manhattan home when she was 13. She wasn’t represented by a lawyer and the suit was dismissed because of technical filing errors, but a similar complaint was filed in a federal court in New York on June 20, 2016, this time by a lawyer. It was later withdrawn, but was refiled that September with additional details before being withdrawn again in November. Shortly before the case was withdrawn, Johnson had canceled a scheduled press conference. Her lawyers said she had received death threats and was too afraid to appear.
I understood that both Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein knew I was 13 years old,” the legal complaint alleged. “Defendant Trump had sexual contact with me at four different parties in the summer of 1994. On the fourth and final sexual encounter with Defendant Trump, Defendant Trump tied me to a bed, exposed himself to me and then proceeded to forcibly rape me. During the course of this savage sexual attack, I loudly pleaded with Defendant Trump to stop but he did not. Defendant Trump responded to my pleas by violently striking me in the face with his open hand and screaming that he would do whatever he wanted.” The suit also said that Trump threatened to hurt the girl and her family if she ever told anyone
Johnson’s suit contained allegations against Epstein as well, including that he raped Johnson both vaginally and anally while hitting her in the head with a closed fist because he was angry that Trump had taken her virginity instead of him.
Eventually Trump found an easier way to surround himself with models than chasing them at bars and parties: He started his own modeling agency. Some of the Trump girls didn’t have work visas, Pilling said, and many of the foreign girls were too young to be working legally in the United States.
In 1996, Trump purchased the Miss Universe Organization, which also operates the Miss USA and Miss Teen USA pageants.
“I made the bikinis smaller and the heels higher,” he told David Letterman in 2010. Despite those viewer-baiting changes, Trump didn’t leave the outcome to chance. On more than one occasion he intervened to get the final candidates he favored.
With Miss Universe he had a bigger and flashier pageant that he could call his own. Once he took it over, he was hands-on. From the very beginning, Trump exercised what he saw as the owner’s prerogative. “I’ll go backstage before a show, and everyone’s getting dressed and ready and everything else,” Trump told Howard Stern during a radio broadcast in 2005. “No men are anywhere, and I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant and therefore I’m inspecting it.… ‘Is everyone okay?’ You know, they’re standing there with no clothes. ‘Is everybody okay?’ And you see these incredible-looking women, and so I sort of get away with things like that.
The pageant contestants were not professional models who were used to being seen in their underwear, and Trump’s appearance created a stir.
Samantha Holvey told CNN that when she was 20 and competing in the 2006 Miss USA pageant, Trump made pointed visual inspections of all the contestants. “He would step in front of each girl and look you over from head to toe like we were just meat, we were just sexual objects, that we were not people,” she said. “You know when a gross guy at the bar is checking you out? It’s that feeling.” Being ogled by Trump made Holvey feel “the dirtiest I felt in my entire life.
She and her fellow contestants were also invited to private parties filled with “old, rich, drunk guys ogling all over us.
The 2013 Miss Washington USA, Cassandra Searles, felt degraded by her involvement in the pageant. In a 2016 post on Facebook, she called Trump a misogynist and said that he treated her and her fellow Miss USA contestants “like cattle,” lining them up “so he could get a closer look at his property.” She later added a comment to her post saying, “He probably doesn’t want me telling the story about that time he continually grabbed my ass and invited me to his hotel room.” Paromita Mitra, Miss Mississippi USA in 2013, added her own comment. “I literally have nightmares about that process,” she wrote.
Trump was also said to eliminate women “who had snubbed his advances.
Did Trump actually have sex with contestants? He bantered about it with Howard Stern in 2005, and suggested that sleeping with the girls might be his “obligation.
Back in the late 1970s, Jessica Leeds was one of the few women who flew alone for business. She had taken her seat in economy on a Braniff Airways flight from Dallas to New York when a flight attendant approached the 38-year-old newsprint saleswoman and asked if she would like to be upgraded to first class. Leeds didn’t need a second invitation, and followed the airline employee to the front of the plane. She slipped into a brown leather seat next to Donald Trump. What allegedly happened next is now well known: After introducing themselves, the two ate their dinners in silence. When the meal service was over, Trump raised the armrest between them and “suddenly turned on me and started groping me and kissing me,” Leeds, now in her seventies, told us during an interview in her apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. “He hadn’t said anything.
When he started putting his hand up my skirt that I just ripped myself out of the seat, stood up, grabbed my purse, and went stomping to the back of the airplane,” where she remained for the rest of the flight. After landing, “I stayed there and waited for the entire plane to clear because I didn’t want to take the chance of running into him,” she said.
In terms of timing, Jessica Leeds’s accusation, dating back to the late 1970s was an outlier.
The first cluster of Trump’s alleged gropings dates to the early 1990s, around the time his marriage to Ivana collapsed.
Anderson, an aspiring model in her early twenties, was perched on a velvet couch in the club when a man sitting next to her slid his hand up her skirt and touched her vagina through her underwear. Shocked, she jumped up and turned to see Donald Trump, she told the Washington Post. She and her friends were “very grossed out and weirded out,” she said. “It wasn’t a sexual come-on. I don’t know why he did it. It was like just to prove that he could do it and nothing would happen. There was zero conversation. We didn’t even really look at each other. It was very random, very nonchalant on his part.
The three had dinner together at the Plaza hotel; Trump was dating Marla Maples at the time, but didn’t bring her along. During dinner, Trump repeatedly put his hands up Harth’s skirt, trying to touch “her intimate private parts,” she alleged in her lawsuit. “You know, there’s going to be a problem,” he told Houraney that night. “I’m very attracted to your girlfriend.” The couple returned to Florida, but Trump continued to call Harth, telling her he wanted to sleep with her.
While giving Harth a tour of the estate that evening, he allegedly pinned her against the wall of his daughter Ivanka’s bedroom. She was stunned when Trump started kissing and groping her, “touching her intimately,” according to the court filing. “It was a shock,” Harth said in 2016. “I pushed him off me. And I was, I said to him, ‘What are you doing? Why are you doing this?’” Trump was twice her weight, and she was worried he would rape her. She was so fearful that she began vomiting profusely as a defense mechanism. She felt “degraded and humiliated as a female,” the lawsuit said.
Harth thinks Trump couldn’t believe she was resisting him. “Donald gets what he wants,” she said in a 2016 interview. “I believe, in his mind, he was—this was a come-on for him, some kind of romantic overture. Whereas for me, it was unwanted and aggressive, very sexually aggressive.
“He constantly called me and said: ‘I love you, baby, I’m going to be the best lover you ever had. What are you doing with that loser, you need to be with me, you need to step it up to the big leagues,’” Harth said. His apparent desire for her didn’t stop him from asking her to provide him with “access” to a 17-year-old beauty contestant from Czechoslovakia, the lawsuit alleges. The lawsuit also says that Trump called some of the “Calendar Girls” over a period of several years, offering career advancement in exchange for sexual favors. Harth’s lawsuit said he harassed her for six years.
Entrepreneur Lisa Boyne accepted an invitation from her pal Sonja Morgan (now of Real Housewives of New York fame) in 1996 and found herself at dinner with Trump. “He was a douche bag,” she told us. “He took all the air out of the limo. He wouldn’t let anyone talk.
Boyne, Morgan, and a handful of models were sandwiched between the two men. Trump started asking Boyne which of the models she thought he should sleep with. Who do you think the hottest girl is?’ ‘Rate all these women I’m dating.’
If the women wanted to get out of the booth, the men made them walk across the table. Trump “stuck his head right under the women’s skirts” and commented on whether or not they were wearing underwear and on their genitalia, Boyne told the Huffington Post. “It was the most offensive scene I’ve ever been a part of. I wanted to get the heck out of there.” Boyne says she left before the appetizers arrived.
Cathy Heller was at Mar-a-Lago with her husband, her three kids, and stood up, planning to shake Trump’s hand. “He took my hand, grabbed me, and went for the lips,” she said. Heller turned her head when she realized what was happening, so his kiss landed on the side of her mouth. Trump was angry that she had twisted away, and walked off.
In 2003, Melinda “Mindy” McGillivray was working as an assistant for a photographer friend of hers at a Ray Charles concert at Mar-a-Lago and was backstage with a small group that included Trump and Melania. “The next thing you know I feel a grab,” she told Megyn Kelly on NBC’s Today show. “I stand there, I’m stunned. I’m speechless. I don’t even know what to do or say in that moment.” She elaborated to the BBC: “It was like someone was trying to feel whether a fruit was ripe at the store.” It made her feel “violated, entirely violated,” she said. “To see someone who resembled my father grab me like that was just deplorable.” The encounter left her feeling overlooked and unimportant. “He didn’t even acknowledge me,” McGillivray, who was twenty-three at the time, told Kelly. “It made me feel very small, inferior.
Trump told Stoynoff there was a “tremendous” room in the mansion he wanted to show her. “We walked into that room alone, and Trump shut the door behind us,” Stoynoff recounted in a 2016 article in People. “I turned around, and within seconds he was pushing me against the wall and forcing his tongue down my throat.” Trump was big and fast, Stoynoff said. She says she was saved by a butler who came into the room to tell Donald that Melania was on her way down to resume the interview. “I was still in shock and remained speechless as we both followed him to an outdoor patio overlooking the grounds,” Stoynoff wrote. “In those few minutes alone with Trump, my self-esteem crashed to zero. How could the actions of one man make me feel so utterly violated?
Trump seemed oblivious to the emotional damage he had wrought. “You know we’re going to have an affair, don’t you?” he said to Stoynoff while settling on a love seat and waiting for Melania to join him. “Have you ever been to Peter Luger’s for steaks? I’ll take you. We’re going to have an affair, I’m telling you.” Melania returned and Trump went back to playing the devoted husband.
In the hotel suite, he immediately started kissing her with an open mouth, she contends. Zervos walked away from Trump and sat in a chair and tried to strike up a conversation. He asked her to come sit next to him, and when she did he grabbed her shoulder, started kissing her aggressively, and put his hand on her breast, she said at the press conference. She got up, and he tried to pull her into the bedroom, saying, “Let’s lay down and watch some telly telly,” Zervos recounted. He put her in an embrace and she tried to push him away, saying, “Come on, man, get real.” He mimicked Zervos’s words back to her while “thrusting his genitals” at her, she said. When Trump denied her allegations and called her a “liar,” she filed a defamation lawsuit against him, which, as of June 2019, his lawyers continued to fight.
Karen Johnson, who alleged that Trump groped her and grabbed her by the genitals at the New Year’s Eve party at Mar-a-Lago, hesitated to tell anyone about her experience. “I feared that because I had been a dancer many years before they would say to me, ‘Well, you must have asked for it,’” she told us. “What he did was very traumatizing to me,” Johnson added. “And it still is. You know, I didn’t ask for that. I was literally just walking through a room… no matter what my past is I don’t deserve to be treated that way.” Despite her fears about not being believed, she is clear that she didn’t bring the assault on herself. “This is about a monster, an immature child running around who has no respect for anybody but himself and his giant ego,” she said.
When Maples attended the 1987 boxing match between Mike Tyson and Tyrell Biggs at the Trump Plaza in Atlantic City, she did so accompanied by her ex-boyfriend Tom Fitzsimmons, a former New York policeman who worked as Trump’s bodyguard for a while and regularly served as cover for their relationship. Trump also enlisted Alan Lapidus, the architect on the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, as a beard, as well as others in his employ. Lapidus recalled having dinner with Marla one evening and then driving off with her in a limousine. After traveling a few blocks, the car pulled up next to an identical one, in which sat Trump. Marla switched cars and Lapidus went home to his wife. “Donald used a lot of us that way,” Jack O’Donnell, former president and chief operating officer of Trump Plaza, said in an interview for The Trump Dynasty documentary on the A&E network.
In her deposition, Ivana said that in 1989, after seeing the results of Ivana’s visit to the plastic surgeon in Los Angeles, Trump decided to visit the same doctor for scalp reduction surgery, a procedure in which a doctor slices out a hairless section of scalp and sews together the remaining skin to cover bald spots. Between the headaches from his newly tightened scalp and the aching suture itself, the surgery left Trump in agonizing pain, according to Ivana’s account in the court deposition. He turned his rage on Ivana. “Your fucking doctor has ruined me,” the documents say Trump shouted at her. He grabbed her and began tearing clumps of her signature platinum locks out of her head. He then ripped her clothes off, unzipped his pants, and forced himself inside her for the first time in more than a year. “According to versions she repeats to some of her closest confidants, ‘he raped me,’” Hurt wrote.
Barbara Res, a former Trump Organization executive, told the Washington Post. “After that I don’t think he was considered a serious businessman… when he broke up with Ivana and did the Playboy and all that. I think that was the beginning of the end of him being a serious businessman… and he moved into being a cartoon.” The transformation took place on a personal level as well. Trump became more sexist, more openly objectifying, Res said. She recounted a meeting they had with a potential architect for a project the company was undertaking in California. Out of the blue, “[Trump] says, ‘I hear that the women of Marina del Rey…’ And he starts talking about women’s bodies. And that was just, it was a shock to me and a shock to the architect. We were just, ‘What is he saying?’” Res said she saw an ugly side of Trump emerge. “He used to be deferential to women,” she wrote in the Guardian.
As Trump became more famous, his behavior toward women worsened.
Trump is said to have impregnated several women and facilitated the terminations
“There are women who have had abortions paid for by Donald Trump. I don’t have the medical records to prove that, but they’ve told girlfriends about it,” said former Pulitzer Prize–winning Philadelphia Inquirer reporter David Cay Johnston. “It’s one of many things that’s sort of common knowledge about Donald.” Johnston said he never published the names of the women who received abortions because he was unable to obtain both their permission and their medical records. Johnston said, however, that he knows the identities of the “brand-name” women, whom he says would be familiar figures to the public.
Trump was no more faithful to Marla after taking his vows than he had been before. He continued to harass Jill Harth and the women from her Calendar Girls beauty contest, according to her lawsuit, and before Tiffany’s second birthday he had had an affair with New Zealand model Kylie Bax. And he reportedly continued his old modelizing habits. Author Laurence Leamer wrote in his book Mar-a-Lago that staff said there were often models traveling with Trump on his plane.
Marla got a reckoning of her own. In May 1997 Trump dialed the New York Post and gave them an exclusive story. Marla learned about it the next day, when she opened the door of her apartment and saw the headline: “Donald is Divorcing Marla,” according to an account by the late Trump biographer Robert Slater. The announcement was well timed—for Trump. Had they stayed married longer, he would have had to pay her more in the divorce, according to their prenup.
“Marla’s a good girl, and I had a good marriage with her, but it’s just that I get fuckin’ bored,
“He came in to The Apprentice believing his own hype. He has a problem with that,” Katherine Walker, the show producer for the first five seasons of The Apprentice, told us. “That’s his Achilles’ heel. Once it’s not about him, he can’t function. Trump Organization, Trump Tower, Trump, Trump, Trump. That’s a huge weird psyche thing.
Trump’s objectification of women permeated the set, both in the boardroom and behind the scenes. Summer Zervos, a contestant in season five, accused him of sexual misconduct and filed a defamation lawsuit against him in 2017.
Proximity to the women didn’t deter Trump from discussing their desirability. “We were in the boardroom one time figuring out who to blame for the task, and he just stopped in the middle and pointed to someone and said, ‘You’d fuck her, wouldn’t you? I’d fuck her. C’mon, wouldn’t you?’” a former crew member told the Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity because of a nondisclosure agreement. “Everyone is trying to make him stop talking, and the woman is shrinking in her seat.
Pinkett and five other former contestants on the show were so disturbed when Trump announced his candidacy for president that they spoke out against him publicly. “Because our allegiance to our country supersedes our relationship with Donald, we see today as an act of patriotism and not disloyalty,” Pinkett said in a press conference, representing the group. “We believe the American people have a right to be as informed as they can be in this election regarding Donald’s qualifications as the Republican Party’s front-runner and leading candidate to become president. Today we denounce Donald’s campaign of sexism, xenophobia, racism, violence, and hate as a unified team.
There is no doubt that Melania knew exactly what she was getting into when she married Trump. “He was known as a ladies’ man,” she told Barbara Walters in an interview the couple did during the campaign. Trump had cheated publicly on his previous two wives and made his disregard of fidelity clear in his 2000 book, The America We Deserve.
Melania seems to have been willing to accept that. Despite the occasional squall, the Donald-Melania pairing was much less stormy than his time with Marla had been. That’s largely down to Melania’s unflappable disposition. Friends describe her as serene, and Trump’s older children referred to her as “the Portrait” because she spoke so little.
Trump has also shown a willingness to pay for sex. Drake and McDougal may be the only women who have publicly said that he offered them money, but stories about him doing so have been making the rounds for decades. “Donald has a magic number and I’ve heard it from more than one girl,” Evans said. “Jessica Drake dropped the ten-thousand-dollar number. Other girls that I’ve talked to, that’s the amount of money that he’s offered. Those aren’t going rates for porn girls. Normally if a porn star is an escort, she’s getting like a thousand dollars for an hour. So for someone like him to out of the ballpark offer like ten grand, he knows in a likelihood they’re not going to say no.
The stories about Trump and porn stars date back decades. “It goes back to the eighties,” Evans said. “In my world, Donald Trump is someone who has been talked about prior to being president. There’s friends I’ve worked with who have told me this directly.… I heard it for years.” Evans said she knows of at least three porn stars who claimed they were paid to have sex with Trump—two of whom she said told her directly.
John Tino didn’t just hear about Trump having sex with porn stars—he alleges he saw it firsthand. Between 1981 and 1983 Tino worked in a private brothel in Times Square above a theater that showed porn movies and had live sex shows. The private club—which he said was known as the “VIP Room”—was on the second floor. There was a private entrance around the side so clients could drive right up, enter, and go up the stairs without being seen. Like much of the porn and sex industries in that era, which were controlled by the mafia, Tino’s club was allegedly run by a crime family captain who was killed in a mob hit a few years later. In each room was a hidden camera.
$1,500 an hour, though it could go higher), to escort the clients to their bedrooms, and then to go sit in a locked room and watch the clients on monitors to make sure none of the girls was being roughed up.
Every night when the VIP Room shut down, Tino would collect the tapes and put them in a bag or a box. The following morning he would go downtown to his boss’s office and deliver the tapes to him. The secret club was frequented by a few celebrities, and a client they called “the real estate guy,” Tino said, referring to Trump.
On January 21, 2017, the day after Donald J. Trump was inaugurated the 45th president of the United States of America, hundreds of thousands of women wearing pink cat-eared “pussy hats” flooded the streets of Washington, D.C. They did so to champion a panoply of issues, but mainly to rally against the elevation to the presidency of a man who had advocated, on tape, sexual assault. The women in Washington were joined by millions of women in other U.S. cities and around the world. In D.C. alone, the gathering represented the largest single-day march in U.S. history. The hats, an allusion to Trump’s now-infamous boast on the so-called Access Hollywood tape that he could “grab ’em by the pussy,
He didn’t always succeed in wowing his dates, though. He took artist Lucy Klebanow out to dinner one night in the early 1970s. He picked her up in a white Cadillac convertible and drove her to the famous Peter Luger’s steakhouse in Brooklyn. When the check came at the cash-only establishment, he didn’t have enough to pay for dinner. So she did. He said he’d pay her back, but never did.
The making of Donald Trump, Sexual Predator
Trump’s father was remote, emotionally abusive, and ruled the household with a metaphorical iron fist and a literal wooden spoon, which he employed for paddlings when deemed necessary. “He was a tough, hard-driving guy who didn’t traffic in emotions except perhaps anger.
That reliance on physical dominance rubbed off on Donald, who exhibited a violent streak from an early age, throwing rocks at the baby next door, pulling the pigtails of the girls in his class, throwing cake at birthday parties, and beating up kids in the neighborhood.
As an adult, such belligerence became a point of pride for Trump. “Even in elementary school, I was a very assertive, aggressive kid. In the second grade I actually gave a teacher a black eye—I punched my music teacher because I didn’t think he knew anything about music and I almost got expelled,” Trump boasted, likely falsely, in The Art of the Deal. His self-image, his self-definition, was built around the idea that he was one tough son of a bitch.
He may have been right. It was Fred who drilled into his son’s head the vainglorious mantra “you are a killer, you are a king,” and Fred who drove all his sons to be ruthless and combative. In 1990 he told Donald: “You can have a thousand mistresses if you want, but you can’t have just one. And whatever you do, you never, ever let yourself get caught.”
Trump’s tried-and-tested MO of never surrender, always hit back, and then claim victory comes straight out of the Cohn playbook as well. “You don’t admit to wrongdoing. You go full blaze on the offensive and you go after whatever person or whatever government agency is accusing you of something,” Marcus said in describing Cohn’s worldview. “Ultimately, in Roy’s world, you could settle, but you always had to make it look like you won. That was really important to Roy and is important to Trump. You have to declare yourself the winner.
Trumps military school
White recalled a Saturday night dance, to which he took a date from the local area with whom he had been fixed up. “The girl showed up; she was not from the higher echelons, more like middle class. She had on a beautiful dress, but it was handmade,” White told us. “To me, that was very sweet, like she had worked very hard on it.” Trump, though, noticed the difference between her and the fashion plates he regularly brought to campus. Once the cadets were back in the barracks, he began mocking White’s date. “He called her a ‘dog’ and asked me how I could go with her. His derisive mockery of her just would not stop—and this was in public. He said it to ten different people and he made a huge issue out of it,” White said. “This was just a sweet sixteen- or seventeen-year-old girl. Donald made a point of mocking that poor girl, calling her a ‘dog’ over and over again. Then he would do a dog bark—‘woof woof woof!’
McIntosh, a fellow classmate told Frontline. “I think that the things that we talked about at that time in 1964 really are very close to kind of the way he talks now about women and minorities and people of different religions.… When I hear him speak, I hear these echoes of the barracks life that we had and that we grew out of. Our whole idea of what sex was and the proper way to deal with women came from Playboy.
Trump’s understanding of women doesn’t seem to have evolved much since then.
Not having seen Trump since they graduated from high school, White approached him and said hello. Trump made a bit of small talk with him, then used White as a pawn in his gambit. “He grabbed one of the women by the shoulders, turned her in my direction, forcibly pushed her face next to mine, and said, ‘Would you rather go home with me or with him?’’’ White said. “I just walked out.
First wife Ivana
Trump was still unaware that modeling was not Ivana’s primary skill. When they hit the slopes the next day, he skied carefully, and she flew past him. “I disappeared,” Ivana told an interviewer. “Donald was so angry, he took off his skis, his ski boots, and walked up to the restaurant.… He went foot bare up to the restaurant and said, ‘I’m not going to do this shit for anybody, including Ivana.’ He could not take it that I could do something better than he did.” Already, Trump was showing his need to always have the upper hand,
Ivana and Fred—whom she later described as “a really brutal father”—had butted heads early on, when she joined the Trump family for a meal. “We went to Tavern on the Green for the brunch one Sunday and Trump’s father ordered a steak,” Ivana said. “So all the, you know, the sisters and brothers, they ordered a steak. And I said, ‘Waiter, can I have a filet of sole?’ And Fred looked up at the waitress and, ‘No, she’s going to have a steak.’ I look up at the waiter, I said, ‘No, Ivana is going to have a filet of sole’—because if I would let him just [roll] right over me, it would be all my life and I would not allow it.
Trump, the man who had described his subservient mother as the ideal woman, grew to abhor the tough business side of his wife and came to see putting her to work as a mistake. “I think that was the single greatest cause of what happened to my marriage with Ivana,” he said in a 1994 interview with Nancy Collins for Primetime Live. He hated coming home and hearing her shouting on the phone at someone at the casino who had upset her. “A softness disappeared… she became an executive, not a wife,” he said. What he really wanted was someone to cater to his needs. “I don’t want to sound too much like a chauvinist, but when I come home and dinner’s not ready, I go through the roof,” he said.
Early in their marriage, he reportedly told friends, “I would never buy Ivana any decent jewels or pictures. Why give her negotiable assets?” And on Oprah in 1988: “There’s not a lot of disagreement because, ultimately, Ivana does exactly as I tell her to do.
Nor did Trump spare Ivana the weaponized comments about her appearance. She was showing too much cleavage, her breasts were too small, her dress was ugly, she was too skinny: he had a litany of complaints. When she tried to fix the flaws he saw in her with a trip to Steven Hoefflin, Michael Jackson’s plastic surgeon in Santa Monica, he reportedly complained that he couldn’t stand to touch her “plastic breasts.
“Donald began calling Ivana and screaming all the time: ‘You don’t know what you are doing!’” one of Ivana’s assistants told longtime Trump chronicler Marie Brenner in Vanity Fair.
In the end, Ivana’s success was her downfall. She had become too famous. She was growing dangerously close to overshadowing Trump. “He put her there, but he couldn’t stand it,” Oscar de la Renta executive Boaz Mazor said in New York. “The student surpassed her master.
“I create stars,” Trump told Collins. “I love creating stars, and to a certain extent I’ve done that with Ivana.… Unfortunately, after they’re a star, the fun is over for me. It’s like a creation process.
He used his newfound fame to gain access to the kind of women he liked: young models. Some were so young that you could hardly call them women at all. Ivana was friendly with several designers and was a regular at fashion shows both in New York and in Europe, eventually hosting many fashion events at the Plaza hotel. Trump would often attend shows with her. NaKina Carr was working in New York for Oscar de la Renta and was backstage in the models’ dressing room at one of his fashion shows when she heard Trump’s name mentioned for the first time. She was getting ready when all of a sudden she heard someone shout, “Put your robes on, here he comes!
Carr asked another girl what was wrong, and the girl pointed to a man across the room. “She said, ‘He’s the money man. He can do whatever he wants.… unless you’re a gold digger, you avoid him at all costs.’” Trump walked in like he owned the place, according to Carr’s account, with a pregnant Ivana trailing behind him. “He threw his arms wide open and said, ‘Okay now ladies, drop ’em,’” Carr said. “The one thing I’ll always remember is the dejected look on Ivana’s face in the dressing room. I thought, how horrible, that he would treat her in this way.