Donald Trump has been accused of groping a former model with Jeffrey Epstein.
Stacey Williams, 56, claimed the encounter took place in 1993 when she visited Trump, then a real estate developer who was yet to run for the presidency, at Trump Tower in New York.
The Trump campaign has claimed that the story is fake and was “contrived” by Kamala Harris’ team.
Epstein, the paedophile financier who killed himself in 2019 after being charged with child sex offences, apparently suggested he and Ms Williams, whom he had dated for several months, visit Trump in early 1993.
The two men were “really, really good friends and spent a lot of time together,” the model claimed.
When they arrived, Ms Williams said that Trump put his hands “all over my breasts” as well as her waist and buttocks.
She was “confused” during the alleged groping, and claimed she could see the two men smiling at each other.
Ms Williams made the allegations on a call with a group called Survivors for Kamala, which is made up of survivors of sexual abuse supporting Ms Harris in her election battle against Trump.
‘This is obviously a fake story’
“These accusations, made by a former activist for Barack Obama and announced on a Harris campaign call two weeks before the election, are unequivocally false,” Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s press secretary, said in a statement to The Guardian.
“It’s obvious this fake story was contrived by the Harris campaign.”
Ms Williams, who said she had become friends with Trump at a party in 1992, said she was berated by Epstein after the alleged encounter and came to believe it was part of a “twisted game” between the two men.
“I had this horrible pit in my stomach that it was somehow orchestrated, I felt like a piece of meat,” she said.
Trump had praised Epstein as a “terrific guy” who “likes beautiful women as much as I do” in 2002, but subsequently distanced himself from the financier after his arrest.
“I was not a fan,” he told reporters at a July 2019 news conference. “I had a falling out with him a long time ago.”
