Writer E Jean Carroll interviews fellow Trump accuser Natasha Stoynoff about allegations: ‘He’s right at me, pushing me against a wall’
Carroll will publish series of interviews with women who allege the president harassed or assaulted them
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Your support makes all the difference.E Jean Carroll, the journalist and former advice columnist who has accused Donald Trump of rape, will speak to fellow accusers of the president in a series of interviews running up until the November election.
In the first instalment, published in The Atlantic on Wednesday, Carroll spoke to Natasha Stoynoff, a journalist and author who has accused Trump of forcibly kissing her in 2005, when she was interviewing him for the magazine People.
Stoynoff first came forward in October 2016, during Trump’s presidential campaign. Her testimony came out a few days after the infamous Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump can be heard grabbing about his proclaimed ability to “grab [women] by the p****”, surfaced.
In a piece for People, Stoynoff alleged at the time that Trump had told her he wanted to show her a specific room in his Mar-a-Lago mansion.
“We walked into that room alone, and Trump shut the door behind us. I turned around, and within seconds he was pushing me against the wall and forcing his tongue down my throat,” Stoynoff wrote.
She shared a similar account during her conversation with Carroll, telling her: “I remember it being a dark room. But there are windows, so not too dark. We go in. I’m looking around, wondering what he wants to show me. I hear the door close. I turn around. And— he’s right at me, pushing me against the wall.”
In the interview, as she did in her 2016 essay, Stoynoff alleges that Trump told her: “You know we’re going to have an affair,” outlined a potential outing at the Brooklyn steakhouse Peter Luger, and a New York Post cover in which Trump was purportedly described by his second wife Marla Maples as the “best sex I’ve ever had” (a Hollywood Reporter piece later explored the front page’s complicated backstory).
Trump has denied Stoynoff and Carroll’s allegations. Back when Stoynoff’s piece ran in People in 2016, a spokeswoman told the magazine on his behalf: “This never happened. There is no merit or veracity to this fabricated story.” After Carroll’s allegations came to light in June 2019, Trump said she was “totally lying” and insisted in an interview with The Hill that she’s “not [his] type”.
Carroll sued Trump for defamation in November last year, alleging that the president harmed her career and reputation in his responses to the claims.
A judge in August declined to delay the suit, ruling that the presidency doesn’t give him immunity in the case.
Carroll is seeking damages and is asking Trump to retract his statements. Her attorneys have sought Trump’s DNA as potential evidence.