Bill Cosby. Roger Ailes. And now, Donald Trump. All three men are prominent media figures who have allegedly been getting away with sexual harassment or sexual assault for decades — until now. In 2016, Cosby was charged with sexual assault, Ailes was forced to resign as the CEO of Fox News, and Trump’s presidential campaign started to implode as women started coming forward to accuse him of groping or kissing them without their consent.
Even before the release of the 2005 Access Hollywood tape, Donald Trump’s candidacy was giving women anxiety. But after it came out — and after at least ten women came forward to accuse the Republican nominee of sexual assault — therapists across the country say the election began dredging up memories of sexual assault and harassment for their female clients.
Sarah McCammon, NPR – November 1, 2016
White evangelicals are reliable Republican voters. They also have a long history of demanding that politicians exemplify character and morality in public life. So for many, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump presents a moral dilemma.
“I don’t think she’s a bad person. Trump, I think, is a bad person,” the 70-year-old Fort Myers, Florida, resident said. As for Trump’s accusers, Miller added, “I believe them.” And she said her vote for Clinton is “a default.”
Candice Norwood, The Atlantic –
Last Tuesday, Green shared her personal story to a crowd for just the second time in a week outside the new Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. She and hundreds of young women and allies assembled last week to protest in more than a dozen U.S. cities. Their objective: to condemn Trump’s rhetoric and demand that Republican leaders unendorse him.
Jack Healy, New York Times – October 21, 2016
In 30 years of marriage, Nancy Fagin had never told her husband about “the handling” — how, as an eighth grader volunteering at a small natural history museum in Chicago, she was sexually molested by a security guard. That changed last week. As the couple discussed Michelle Obama’s speech condemning Donald J. Trump’s treatment of women as “intolerable,” Ms. Fagin, 62, who spent her career running a specialty bookstore in Chicago, turned to her husband and said that something had happened to her.
, Hollywood Reporter – October 11, 2016
The Apprentice producer Mark Burnett might not be willing or legally able to release recordings from Donald Trump’s 11-year tenure on the NBC reality show. But in the wake of the Republican presidential candidate’s explosive comments revealed in an Access Hollywood tape from 2005, several people associated with The Apprentice are coming forward to discuss the kind of behavior that might have been on public display had Burnett decided to allow access to the tapes.
Donald Trump has always been sexist. He’s always made women uncomfortable, and in most cases he’s never looked beyond their appearance. And although Republicans have attempted to gloss over Trump’s treatment of women in their discussion of his candidacy, the publication last week of a 2005 conversation in which he brags about sexual assault put the issue front and center.
Elliot Hannon, Slate – October 10, 2016
There is, presumably, a mother lode of outtake footage out there somewhere of Donald Trump acting like Donald Trump. On Monday, the Huffington Post unearthed a transcript (but not the video) of Trump during the ninth season of his reality show, The Apprentice, that is not as profoundly disturbing as the recently released 2005 video of Trump conversing with locker room creep Billy Bush, but is pretty yucky in its own right.
It was Donald J. Trump’s chance to sound contrite and mature, to explain away the sexually predatory boasts he was caught making on tape and to persuade Americans that — for all his no-apologies braggadocio — he was, in fact, capable of feeling shame. Maura Cotter, 22, a senior at the University of Notre Dame, was shocked at what Mr. Trump did instead in Sunday’s debate: repeat, over and over, that what he had said on the 2005 recording, about forcing himself on women and grabbing their genitals, was simply “locker-room banter.”