A former model is alleging that she was sexually assaulted by Donald Trump back in 1997.
Amy Dorris told the Guardian in an exclusive interview that she and her boyfriend – a magazine publisher who was friends with Trump – spent several days with the future president during that year’s U.S. Open tennis tournament in New York. She claims that on Sept. 5, 1997, Trump accosted her outside the bathroom in his VIP box at the tournament.
Dorris, who was 24 at the time, said the real estate magnate forced his tongue down her throat, assaulted her all over her body and held her tight in a grip she could not escape.
She alleged that she told Trump, “No, get away” and, “No, please stop,” but “he didn’t care.”
She said the incident left her feeling “sick” and “violated.”
Dorris’ account was corroborated to the Guardian by several people she confided in after the incident. She also provided the newspaper with her ticket to the U.S. Open and six photos showing her with Trump, who was 51 then and still married to his second wife, Marla Maples.
“It felt like there were tentacles on me that I couldn’t rip off,” Dorris said she told friends of the incident. “I was trying to get his arms off of me, and they would not come off because I wasn’t strong enough.”
Trump’s lawyers strongly denied to the Guardian that he assaulted Dorris. They also questioned why she would have continued to spend the days that followed in Trump’s company and how there were no witnesses in the luxury box. They also said the timing so close to the presidential election suggests the allegations are politically motivated.
Dorris, who was visiting from Florida, said she and her boyfriend still hung out with Trump afterward because she “had no money, nowhere to go” and because she did not fully process what had happened to her until later. She could not remember if she told her then-boyfriend, Jason Binn, the full details of the alleged assault but claims she did say to him: “He’s all over me. … You have to do something.”
Trump’s lawyers say Binn told them he had no recollection of Dorris saying Trump had acted inappropriately toward her.
Dorris also noted that the bathroom in the luxury box was separated by a partition, out of the view of other guests.
More than two dozen women allege they have been victims of sexual misconduct by Trump. Several of them went public four years ago after the 2005 “Access Hollywood” of Trump boasting about kissing and grabbing women in the private parts went public. Trump denied then, too, that he ever sexually assaulted anyone, saying his conversation was just “locker room talk.”
Dorris, who is now 48 and a mother of twin daughters, said she also thought about coming forward in 2016 but ultimately decided against it to protect her family.
“Now I feel like my girls are about to turn 13 years old, and I want them to know that you don’t let anybody do anything to you that you don’t want,” she told the Guardian. “And I’d rather be a role model. I want them to see that I didn’t stay quiet, that I stood up to somebody who did something that was unacceptable.”
