Jill
Harth, woman who sued Trump over alleged sexual assault, breaks
silence
Harth
stands by claims of incident described in 1997 lawsuit as ‘attempted
rape’ and wants apology from Donald Trump: ‘Don’t call me a
liar
Lucia Graves in New
York
@lucia_graves
Wednesday 20 July
2016 19.19 BST
A woman at the
centre of sexual assault allegations against Donald Trump has spoken
for the first time in detail about her personal experience with the
billionaire tycoon who this week became the Republican nominee for
president.
Jill Harth, a makeup
artist, has stayed quiet for almost 20 years about the way Trump
pursued her, and – according to a lawsuit she instigated –
cornered her and groped her in his daughter’s bedroom.
After Trump mounted
his campaign for the White House, details emerged of the 1997
complaint, in which Harth accused him of “attempted ‘rape’”.
She said she was
quickly inundated with interview requests from major US television
networks, but resolved not to speak about the events – until Trump
publicly said in May that her claims were “meritless” and his
daughter Ivanka gave an interview in which she said her father was
“not a groper”.
Harth, who feels she
has been publicly branded a liar and believes her business has
suffered because of her association with the allegations, decided to
speak out about her experience with Trump because she wants an
apology.
In an hour-long
interview at the Guardian’s New York office on Tuesday, Harth said
she stands by her charges against Trump, which run from low-grade
sexual harassment to an episode her lawyers described in the lawsuit
as “attempted ‘rape’”.
She first met Trump
in December 1992 at his offices in Trump Tower, where she and her
then romantic partner, George Houraney, were making a business
presentation. The couple wanted to recruit Trump to back their
American Dream festival, in which Harth oversaw a pin-up competition
known as American Dream Calendar Girls. Harth described that meeting
as “the highlight of our career”.
But in other ways,
it was something of a lowlight: Trump took an interest in Harth
immediately and began subjecting her to a steady string of unwanted
sexual advances, detailed by Harth in her complaint.
There was the
initial leering in that first December meeting in Trump Tower, and
the inappropriate questions after her relationship status. It
continued the next night over dinner at the Plaza Hotel’s Oak Room,
where at a dinner with beauty pageant contestants she alleges he
groped her under the table.
It culminated in
January 1993, when Harth and Houraney were visiting his Florida
mansion, Mar-a-Lago, to finalize and then celebrate the beauty
pageant deal with a party.
After business
concluded, Harth and Houraney were on tour of Mar-a-Lago along with a
group of young pageant contestants – Trump wanted to “see the
quality of the girls he was sponsoring”, Harth recalled – when he
pulled her aside into one of the children’s bedrooms.
“He pushed me up
against the wall, and had his hands all over me and tried to get up
my dress again,” Harth said, “and I had to physically say: ‘What
are you doing? Stop it.’ It was a shocking thing to have him do
this because he knew I was with George, he knew they were in the next
room. And how could he be doing this when I’m there for business?”
Donald Trump in 1992
at his Mar-a-Lago estate, where Harth says ‘he pushed me up against
the wall, and had his hands all over me and tried to get up my
dress’. Photograph: Alamy
Speaking as
Republicans gathered in Cleveland to formally declare Trump as the
party’s candidate in the November general election, Harth said she
had been very reluctant to talk after the sexual assault allegations
resurfaced, “because honestly, it was painful for me to have to do
it again. It was stressful, it gave me anxiety, it definitely wounded
my marriage – it wasn’t the death knell, but it wounded it, it
was stressful having to handle this.”
She recalled how
Trump – who had just gone through a divorce from his first wife,
Ivana, and was in a relationship with Marla Maples, who would become
his second wife – pursued her and urged her to leave Houraney.
“Trump did
everything in his power to get me to leave him. He constantly called
me and said: ‘I love you, baby, I’m going to be the best lover
you ever had. What are you doing with that loser, you need to be with
me, you need to step it up to the big leagues.’
“He was constantly
working on me during that time and that took a toll on me. But I
moved on. I’m a forgiving type person, OK? I’m a Christian, I
moved on.”
‘They tried to get
me to say it never happened’
Trump’s decision
to run for president brought the question to the fore for her once
more. And initially, she said she was inclined to let bygones be
bygones.
She concedes she
even found herself getting excited at the thought that someone she
knew so well was running for president.
A recent Trump rally
she attended seemed to confirm her decision to lie low. “‘Don’t
worry about it,’ I said, ‘I’m not going to say anything bad,
we’ve moved on, we’re friendly,’” Harth recalled in her
interview with the Guardian.
When Trump thanked
her and gave her a hug, she thought he wouldn’t say anything
either.
The interaction,
Harth said, reaffirmed her decision to stay quiet. That is, until she
saw Trump dismiss media reports referencing her case as “meritless”,
or worse.
After the New York
Times ran a story in May this year about Trump’s history with
women, including an account of Harth’s story, Trump’s campaign
even reached out to her to pressure her to take back her account, she
told the Guardian on Tuesday.
“His office –
and I have it on my voicemails that he called, that they called –
they asked me to recant everything when the New York Times article
came out. They were trying to get me to say it never happened and I
made it up. And I said I’m not doing that,” she recalled. Trump’s
office denied this.
She was further
upset by an interview Trump’s daughter Ivanka gave in the wake of
the New York Times article saying her dad is “not a groper”.
“I understand that
the girl wanted to defend her dad, being it’s her dad,” she said,
“but what did she know? She was 10 years old! She was 10 years old
at the time. She didn’t know what her father was about, what he was
doing, how he was acting.”
Such statements felt
defamatory to Harth, adding insult to injury. That’s when she hired
attorney Lisa Bloom to demand that Trump retract his statements that
are, as Bloom put it, “effectively calling her a liar”.
Nobody was
defending me, that's why I'm talking … I went through hell and I
still have to relive this again
Jill Harth
“Jill is very
clear that she is not a liar,” Bloom said. “And her reputation is
important to her. And her living a life free of this kind of stress
is important to her. So we’re calling on not only Mr Trump, Ivanka
Trump, too.”
The renewed
controversy comes as Trump prepares to give his keynote speech in
Cleveland on Thursday. It also comes as Roger Ailes, the chairman and
CEO of Trump-friendly Fox News, is in the process of being ousted
following a sexual harassment suit filed by a former anchor.
When Trump’s
office was asked to respond to Harth’s allegations, they
highlighted her inconsistency about her views on Trump, forwarding
emails from 2015 and as recently as January 2016 in which she
expressed friendly feelings about Trump and even asked about a job
helping to do his campaign trail makeup.
As Harth wrote in an
August 2015 email forwarded by Trump’s campaign: “I also would
like to show my support for Donald and his campaign. I am offering my
services to do his grooming and getting him perfectly camera ready
for photos and Hi-Definition TV. He knows better than anybody how
important image is.”
In another email
from October 2015, she praised Trump for “doing a tremendous job of
shaking things up in the United States” and added: “I am
definitely Team Trump!”
Harth said those
emails were written months before Trump called her integrity into
question. She also defended her action, as a businesswoman who has
never been too proud to look for help where she needs it, even if it
smacks of opportunism.
Harth said of her
wish for an apology from Trump: ‘I don’t fully expect one.’
Meanwhile the fact
that Trump has an army of staffers and family defending him is part
of what inspired her to speak out, she said.
“Nobody was
defending me, that’s why I’m talking,” Harth said. “You can
believe it or not, but I went through hell and I still have to relive
this again. And I just, I’m horrified that I have to think about
this again.”
Michael Cohen,
executive vice-president and special counsel to Donald Trump,
responded by email to a Guardian request for comment, saying: “It
is disheartening that one has to dignify a response to the below
absurd query. Mr Trump denies each and every statement made by Ms
Harth as these 24-year-old allegations lack any merit or veracity.
“Hope [Mr Trump’s
spokeswoman Hope Hicks] will forward to you under separate e-mail, a
series of e-mails documenting Ms Harth’s support of Mr Trump, the
race for the White House as well as seeking a job opportunity with
the campaign.”
In an earlier phone
call, Cohen said Harth had “massive credibility issues”.
Speaking in
Cleveland at the Republican national convention on Wednesday, Roger
Stone, a veteran strategist and longtime Trump adviser, dismissed the
allegations, saying: “I have an excellent bullshit detector.”
Stone added: “A
verbal agreement is entirely unprovable … So it’s more he said,
she said. Sure sounds like bullshit to me.”
Such responses from
the Trump camp aren’t new and neither is the lawsuit, which Harth
brought forward in 1997. She dropped it weeks later after Trump
settled an outstanding business lawsuit from her partner Houraney
claiming he broke contract by backing out of the American Dream
festival. (Houraney sued for $5m but settled with Trump for a
smaller, undisclosed amount.)
Houraney met Harth
when she was still in high school and though he didn’t witness any
of the alleged incidents with Trump, aside from that first meeting in
Trump Tower, Houraney has never doubted her. “I know they’re all
true,” he said of the allegations. “I knew her way too long to
think she could make up stuff like that, It wasn’t in her. She
wasn’t capable of making up the things she said in that thing.”
Harth told the
Guardian she expected very little from Trump. “I’m not going to
get an apology from him. That would be nice, but he – I don’t
fully expect one. But he really should have been taught, if you don’t
have anything nice to say don’t say anything, OK? Don’t call me a
liar.
“He didn’t have
to say anything. For once, he should have closed his mouth. He didn’t
have to comment. We were on great – not great, I’ll take that
back – we were on good terms, friendly terms. He didn’t – he
started this. What is happening now is of his own making, OK? I was
quiet.”
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