Donald Trump kissed and groped me: Woman reveals during trial

International

oi-Prakash KL

An elderly woman has testified that former United States President Donald Trump had sexually assaulted her on a flight in the late 1970s.

The woman named Jessica Leeds told jurors at the Manhattan’s federal court the former President had grabbed her chest and ran his hand up her skirt. She made the comments while testifying in E Jean Carroll’s rape and defamation lawsuit.

The incident occurred in the business class section of a flight to New York in 1978 or 1979. “There was no conversation. It was like out of the blue. It was like a tussle,” she said. “He was trying to kiss me, trying to pull me towards him. He was grabbing my breasts. It was like he had 40 zillion hands. It was like a tussling match between the two of us.”

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She then told him that she “don’t need this”, and stormed to the back of the plane.

In a bid to persuade the nine-member jury that the former US president has a history of assaulting women and that Carroll’s claims were part of a pattern, Carroll’s lawyers had called Leeds to court.

79-year-old Carroll has alleged that he had sexually assaulted her in a changing room at the luxury Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in the mid-1990s.

She has also accused him of defaming her after she spoke about the incident in 2019. After a law took effect in New York which gave the victims a one-year window to sue their alleged abusers decades after attacks may have occurred, she sued him, last year.

Leeds had first spoken about the incident weeks before the 2016 election with the New York Times even as many women made sexual harassment allegations in the run-up to the polls.

She had spoken after Trump had denied all the allegations during a presidential debate with Hillary Clinton. “I was furious because he was lying,” Leeds recounted.

Nonetheless, Donald Trump has denied all the allegations made against him. He has said that the claims made by those victims are politically motivated.

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This is one of the legal cases that he is facing as he seeks a return to the White House in 2024 polls.

Last month, Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 criminal charges stemming from hush-money payments made during the 2016 campaign to bury allegations that he had extramarital sexual encounters.

With inputs from agencies.