The People magazine reporter who claims Donald Trump forced himself on her has broken her silence, revealing the details in which the presidential candidate aggressively pursued her while his then pregnant wife Melania was upstairs at their Florida home in 2005.
Natasha Stoynoff said she had taken a tour of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate before the incident occurred. “We walked into that room alone, and Trump shut the door behind us,” she says in the current issue of People magazine. “I turned around, and within seconds he was pushing me against the wall and forcing his tongue down my throat,” Stoynoff, 51, described, adding that Trump also told her, “We’re going to have an affair, I’m telling you.”
Trump has dismissed the allegations as “outright lies”, going on to attack Stoynoff’s credibility and appearance. “Take a look, you take a look. Look at her, look at her words. You tell me, what you think. I don’t think so — I don’t think so,” Trump said of Stoynoff. “Check out her Facebook page, you’ll understand.”
“It’s possible he just doesn’t remember it,” Stoynoff said in response. “It was over 10 years ago and I assume I am one of many, many women. But I was obviously good-looking enough for him at the time to force-kiss me and insist that we were going to have an affair.”
Six colleagues and close friends of Stoynoff’s have also come forward to validate her claims, including People East Coast Editor Liz McNeil, who remembers the day Stoynoff returned from the assignment in Florida to cover Trump and his wife’s first anniversary.
“She was very upset and told me how he shoved her against a wall,” says McNeil. “The thing I remember most was how scared she was. I felt I had to protect her.”
Deputy East Coast News Editor Mary Green also recalled Stoynoff’s shaken reaction to the incident. “In an early conversation we had in her office, she told me about what happened with Donald Trump,” Green said. “She was shaky, sitting at her desk. She talked about her shock, and wondered why it had happened, if she had done anything wrong. I assured her she hadn’t. She was also angry that he had forced himself on her, that she was glad someone had interrupted him, because he was surprisingly strong.”
In the past week, multiple women have come out with similar claims of sexual assault against the 70-year-old Republican presidential candidate, all of which he has denied.
“Women are talking about this, and they need to,” Stoynoff said.“We cannot be silent anymore. I didn’t tell my story for politics, I told it for women.”
