Karena Virginia, who in 2016 accused Trump of touching her breast outside a different U.S. Open tournament in 1998, the response to her and other women’s allegations has been more traumatic than the incident itself. At some points over the past week, she said, “I felt myself very frozen.” When she heard people dismissing the behavior Daniels described, she said, it reminded her of how she and other women felt shrugged off.
“It’s the responses — it’s the overhearing the conversations in the grocery store or even just when I dropped off some paperwork at a doctor’s office and the receptionist was just chatting with me and saying” — in reference to the trial where Daniels testified — “how, you know, men will be boys,” Virginia said.
In 2018, when he was president, Trump called Daniels “horseface.” He has dismissed some of his female accusers in similar terms, saying they “would not be my first choice.” Speaking of Carroll in 2019, Trump said, “Not my type.”
Trump’s New York trial will not adjudicate any claims of sexual misconduct, and prosecutors have emphasized in court that Daniels is not alleging assault. Instead, they are trying to prove that Trump falsified business records to cover up reimbursements to lawyer Michael Cohen, who had paid Daniels. Yet the prosecution has argued that Trump was motivated to buy Daniels’s silence because his campaign was afraid of how female voters might react to her account after the publication of the “Access Hollywood” tape.
Amy Dorris tried not to watch too much news last week as Stormy Daniels gave her courtroom account of sex with Donald Trump. But little details from Daniels’s story have stuck with her, she said.
The age gap. Daniels’s description of leaving a hotel bathroom and being surprised to see Trump in his boxers. Dorris said it reminded her of her own encounter with Trump outside a restroom in 1997, when she and her boyfriend attended the U.S. Open tennis tournament in Trump’s VIP box. “I came out,” Dorris recalled, “and there he was.”
Dorris said Trump was suddenly kissing her and groping all over her body, despite her protests. She first disclosed her account publicly in 2020 after years of hesitation. Trump at the time denied the allegation through a lawyer. Dorris said she lost friends, shut down her social media and left her house for months over worries about her safety and privacy.
Now, Dorris and some other women who had publicly accused Trump of kissing or touching them inappropriately — sometimes alleging assault — are watching his campaign to return to public office with alarm. They are confiding in one another, following Trump’s trials together and occasionally talking over Zoom. Despite a national reckoning with sexual misconduct shortly after Trump’s 2016 election, they feel the former president is politically more impervious than ever to their claims.
More than a dozen women have accused Trump, who is on course to be the Republican nominee for president for a third straight time, of sexual assault or aggressive, unwanted advances they said left them feeling violated. Trump or his representatives have denied all of the accusations and have sought to undermine the credibility of the accusers. The accounts span several decades and some have resurfaced in the criminal and civil trials he has faced as he seeks to return to the White House. Many of the allegations first emerged publicly in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign, and Trump argued that they were politically motivated.
“Do you not believe us?” Dorris asked of Trump supporters this past week. “Or do we not matter?”
Her mother said in 2020 that Dorris told her about the U.S. Open incident shortly after it happened. A friend said then that Dorris had first relayed her account of the incident 12 or 13 yearsearlier.
“Where is his accountability?” Dorris asked, speaking of Trump.
Trump is barred by a court order in his ongoing criminal trial, which is unrelated to Dorris, from responding publicly to witnesses such as Daniels — a prohibition his lawyers have complained is deeply unfair as he campaigns for president. “This Judge has taken away my Constitutional Right to FREE SPEECH,” Trump wrote recently on social media, though such gag orders are common in criminal cases. His case centers on charges of falsifying records related to a hush money payment made to Daniels in 2016. Trump has said he did not have sex with Daniels.
The Trump campaign declined to comment for this story. Todd Blanche, an attorney for Trump, sent a letter to The Washington Post on Saturday asserting that the previously reported claims by women against Trump were “false and defamatory — as well as old, and strongly refuted.” He argued that the gag order “unlawfully restricts” Trump from responding to The Post’s reporting.
“The gag order is so overbroad and illegal that it prohibits President Trump from causing us, as his attorneys, from addressing the central tenant of your ‘story,’” Blanche wrote. He added that he planned “to initiate litigation should the Washington Post run the story maliciously defaming and denigrating President Trump.” The judge overseeing his trial has ruled that Trump has violated the gag order 10 times, resulting in $10,000 in fines.
