“I am here to stand up for myself, my family—particularly my daughter, ” Virginia said in a prepared statement, stressing that “no one has asked me to come forward.”
Virginia said that Trump had harassed her in 1998 at the U.S. Open tennis tournament in Queens, when she was 27 years old. She said he approached her as she was waiting for a car to take her home, grabbing her arm and touching her breast.
“He said ‘Hey, look at this one, we haven’t seen her before. Look at those legs, ’ as if I was an object, not a person, ” Virginia recalled.
“‘Don’t you know who I am?’, ” she claimed Trump told her.
Virginia joins a growing list of women who have already publicly claimed Trump had groped, kissed, or otherwise engaged them in lewd behavior without their consent. The allegations have become a major problem for Trump in the waning weeks of the 2016 election, after footage of Trump bragging about sexual assault in 2005 was unearthed by The Washington Post.
In it, Trump claimed to then-“Access Hollywood” personality Billy Bush: “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”
Following the tape’s release, numerous women have seemingly confirmed the behavior Trump described in 2005. A New York Times feature published shortly thereafter claimed Trump groped Jessica Leeds aboard an airplane flight in the early 1980s. Trump has vehemently denied all the allegations made against him, calling them “lies” and “fiction.”