The Eric Bauman Quandry

Nevada Democratic congressman, Ruben Kihuen, didn't run for reelection because he was accused, credibly, of sexual harassment of women over whom he had some degree of power. Last week the House Ethics Committee concluded that he was, indeed, a sexual harasser, detailing repeated instances of Kihuen harassing women who either worked for him, worked for a company that he'd hired or lobbied him during his time in the Nevada State Senate. I think he's planning on running for the Las Vegas City Council. (Hey, two weeks ago, Nevada voters elected Republican brothel owner Dennis Hof to the state legislature. Hof was a Trump-like reality TV celebrity, who had died several weeks earlier. He won!) Kihuen is hardly the only member of Congress who gets carried away with a sense of his own power and last week the 10 members of the House Ethics Committee urged Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer to quickly pass anti-sexual harassment legislation to overhaul the Congressional Accountability Act.

Do you know what "gay panic defense" is? Usually it involves a heterosexual man who is trying to accomplish something-- perhaps defending himself in a murder or assault case-- by claiming a gay man's advances triggered a psychotic state in him. Since 2014 California became the first of only 3 states to ban it from jury trials. This morning a seemingly coordinated effort was reported in the press claiming that California Democratic Party chairman Eric Bauman is a serial sexual harasser and assaulter. I imagine some of the straight guys who he touched-- innocently enough from his own perspective-- may have been panicked by a superior rubbing their shoulder.

Recently, I was sitting with a young Democratic consultant in a posh DC restaurant when a prominent political figure swept down the aisle with an aide and plopped herself down at our booth. Congress isn't a big enough playing field for her; she's running for president. She's around my age-- triple the age of the young consultant, "Jolting Joe," who I had brought along so she could interview him for a campaign job. She must have found him attractive because introductions were barely made before she started fondling his hair. That happens to him a lot-- older women and horny guys politics are drawn to him. Joe shrugs it off. He's good at his job and feels secure in his skin. Not everyone is so sure of themselves.

A longtime top Democratic Party activist, who first introduced me to Eric Bauman, told me this morning that "These so called shoulder massages, which I have witnessed myself, last maybe 30 seconds. They are done in public, usually while several people standing around talking. They are just Eric's way of saying 'thank you' for a job well done. There is nothing sexual about them. Eric has been in a  monogamous thirty year relationship with his husband whom he adores and who adores him. I find the timing of this attack, coming after Eric and the Democratic Party's spectacular success in the midterm primaries, particularly  suspect. There is a clean way to become Chair of the California Democratic Party-- run against Eric and win-- but I guess if you can't beat him in a fair election then you have to play dirty."


And Here's To You, Mrs. Robinson

by Jolting Joe

Hide it in the hiding place where no one ever goes
Put it in your pantry with your cupcakes
It's a little secret just the Robinson's affair
Most of all you've got to hide it from the kids

Koo-koo-ka-choo, Mrs. Robinson,
Jesus loves you more than you will know
Wo wo wo
God bless you, please, Mrs. Robinson
Heaven holds a place for those who pray
Hey, hey, hey hey, hey, hey

Sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon
Going to the candidates' debate
Laugh about it, shout about it
When you've got to choose
Every way you look at this you lose

Donald Trump is a sexual predator. In addition to the countless women who have come out and said as much, Trump himself boasted about it in a tape recorded conversation between himself and spoiled imbecile turned fake-news anchor Billy Bush. Trump fits one classic definition of a sexual predator-- a rich, silver spoon fed child-man who believes he is entitled to whatever he wants. He's at the top of the food chain among sexual predators; his actions are disgusting. Period.

Eric Bauman, chairman of the California Democratic Party, on the other hand, is not.

The #MeToo movement has played an important role in exposing reprehensible behavior. There are a lot of malicious, disgusting men and women who have used their positions of power inappropriately and their punishments are welcomed with open arms. However, there' a flip side.

I can tell you firsthand that after spending 10+ years in the political industry, men and women in office are often aggressive in their physical-- not necessarily sexual-- expression. Just look at men and women courting votes on the trail and you'll see a male politician hug a female voter for more than a few seconds as a way of expressing affection or gratitude or some kind of relief. You'll see a female politician throw her arms around a male voter and stand there with cameras on her as she tries to express her desire to earn his vote. It happens every day. Assault? No.

I can tell you that in office settings, male and female politicians express affection, admiration, and often gratitude, physically-- not sexually-- and sometimes its met with appreciation and sometimes its not. For example, recently, a politician had his arm around me for a bit too long and I simply said, "enough, please." And he stopped and that was it. We even laughed about it. I didn't think I was being assaulted, because I wasn't! It was a politician being a politician. Don't like 'em, don't work for 'em.

One time I was at a restaurant with a prospective female candidate and in the middle of the dinner she began stroking my hair like Mrs. Robinson did to Dustin Hoffman's character in The Graduate. Strange, but well, she was (and is) an extrovert. I'm sure she still does that type of thing often! Weird and annoying? Yes. Assault? NO.

My point is, the nature of a politician leads them-- men and women-- to be touchy and quick to express their emotions and feelings. That is not assault. Are people on the receiving end not able to simply say "please stop," or "no thanks," or "get off me?" We are losing the fight against the true abusers-- the rich CEO's who use their power for unwanted sexual gain and even the gross President of the United States who boasts about this type of behavior freely-- if we let politicians' behavior blind us from the actual realities of a very serious topic.

I do not know Mr. Bauman's accusers and I agree that protecting them is key. But, this apparent witch hunt is now apparently consuming California Democratic politics. It's just wrong to launch a coup without properly examining the situation at hand. Maybe Eric crossed the line. Then it's time for him to go. But I would bet that there is an awfully good chance he didn't. And this current exercise in finger pointing and demonizing will lead us off track on the real fights at hand.

We should all look forward to Daraka Larimore Hall's investigation here. I'm sure he is prepared to adequately assess the situation. But if he's not, and this is just another one of his ego-driven power grabs, lets move on.

Politicians are extroverts, it's in their nature.

Donald Trump is a predator.

There's a big, big difference there.

Let's not forget that.

When Will Trump's Life Catch Up With Him? Meet Rachel Crooks, An Ohio Legislative Candidate

Blue America didn't endorse Rachel Crooks because of her Trump saga. We endorsed her because she's running on a Bernie-like platform and seemed to us in a position where she could flip an Ohio state legislative seat from red to blue. The Trump saga will help her do that by bringing her some attention from the media. Like the Washington Post this week. Eli Saslow's story, date-lined Tiffin, Ohio, is powerful and compelling. and I hope it helps bring Rachel the campaign money she needs to get her platform out to voters in the 88th district (parts of Sandusky and Seneca counties). "There were 19 women in all," wrote Saslow, "who made public accusations of sexual misconduct, or 'The Nineteen,' as they had come to be known on T-shirts and bumper stickers. Most had come forward with their stories after Trump launched his presidential campaign in 2015, and the experiences they described having with him spanned five decades. They claimed Trump had 'acted like a creepy uncle,' or 'squeezed my butt,' or 'eyed me like meat,' or 'stuck his hand up under my skirt,' or 'groped with octopus hands,' or 'pushed me against a wall,' or 'thrust his genitals,' or 'forced his tongue into my mouth' or 'offered $10,000 for everything.'"

In response, Trump had called the accusations against him “total fabrications” based on “political motives” to destroy his campaign and then his presidency. “Nothing ever happened with any of these women,” Trump tweeted once. “Totally made up nonsense to steal the election. Nobody has more respect for women than me!”

One woman accused Trump of assaulting her in the middle of a commercial flight after they met as seatmates in the 1970s. Another said it happened in a conference room during the middle of a job interview. Another, a journalist for People magazine, said Trump forced his tongue into her mouth as they finished an interview for a feature story about his marriage to Melania. The list of accusers included a reality-TV host, a runner-up on The Apprentice, a yoga instructor, an adult-film star and several women who had competed in Trump’s beauty pageants: a Miss New Hampshire, Miss Washington, Miss Arizona and Miss Finland.

And then there was Crooks, who had never been on reality TV, never drank alcohol, never met anyone famous until she moved from her childhood home in Green Springs to New York City in the summer of 2005. Nobody else in three generations of her family had ever seen the appeal in leaving Green Springs, population 1,300, but nobody else was quite like her: striking and self-assured at 6 feet tall; all-state in basketball, volleyball and track; the high school salutatorian and “Most Likely to Succeed.” She wanted to backpack across Europe, earn her doctorate, work in high-end fashion and live in a skyscraper that looked out over something other than an endless grid of brown-and-green soybean fields. “New York is where you can make things happen,” she had written to a friend back then, and a few weeks after graduating from college she persuaded her high school boyfriend, Clint Hackenburg, to move with her.

They rented a room in a cheap group house way out in Bay Ridge, and she took the first job she could find on Craigslist to pay rent, at an investment firm in Trump Tower called Bayrock. Her secretarial tasks were to make coffee, water the two office palm trees, polish the gold-trimmed mirrors, straighten the tassels on the Oriental rug at the entryway and sit at a mahogany welcome desk to greet visitors who came through the glass front doors.

She found the work mindless and demeaning, but all around her was the promise of New York. There was Oprah Winfrey, filming a TV show next to the two-story Christmas wreath in the main lobby. There was George Clooney, strolling past the office. There was Trump, an occasional business partner with Bayrock, standing right outside the glass doors every few days with his bodyguard as he waited for the elevator to take him back to his $100 million penthouse on the 66th floor. She remembered that sometimes he looked in and smiled at her. At least once she thought she saw him wave. “If you’re working in that building, you’ve got to at least meet him,” Hackenburg told her, and after five months Crooks finally got up from her desk and went out to say hello. It was early in the morning, and the office was mostly empty. She walked toward Trump, who she remembers was standing by himself in the small waiting area near the elevators. She held out her hand, intent on introducing herself not as a fan or as a secretary but as a business partner.

“Mr. Trump, I wanted to say hi, since our companies do a little work together,” she remembered telling him that day, and then, before she understood what was happening, she remembered Trump becoming the second man ever to kiss her.

“Fiction,” was what Trump’s campaign called her story when Crooks first told it publicly in 2016. “It is absurd to think that one of the most recognizable business leaders on the planet with a strong record of empowering women in his companies would do the things alleged,” the campaign said.

But Crooks’s version of that day was prompting more and more questions in her mind. Why did she sometimes feel as if he was still holding her in place? Why had she spent so much of the past decade recoiling from that moment-- back behind the receptionist desk, back inside of her head, back home to the certainty and simplicity of small-town Ohio? It was just a dreadful kiss, or at least that’s what she kept trying to tell herself to quiet the confusion that had grown out of that moment, turning into shame, hardening into anxiety and insecurity until nearly a decade later, when she first started to read about other women whose accusations sounded so much like her own. Kissed at a party. Kissed in a dance club. Kissed during a business meeting. Kissed while attending a Mother’s Day brunch at Mar-a-Largo. “For the first time, I started to think it wasn’t my fault for being clueless and naive, or for something I did wrong in seeming that way to him,” Crooks said in one of her first public statements about Trump in 2016. Maybe together with the other accusers their stories had power, Crooks thought. Maybe, if the accusations alone weren’t enough to hold Trump accountable for his behavior, the women could force the country to pay attention with better messaging and greater theatrics.

Late in 2017, Crooks agreed to join several accusers for television interviews and news conferences in New York. “A call to action,” the invitation read, because their goal was to demand a congressional investigation into Trump’s alleged sexual misconduct. Crooks wrote herself some reminders for effective public speaking: “Use detail and repetition.” “Make it personal.” “Focus on solutions.” She volunteered to speak first, squared her shoulders and then turned to face the cameras with the poise of the athlete she had been.

“By now all of you are probably familiar with my story,” she said before beginning it again. The 24th floor. His lips coming toward hers. His hands holding her in place until the elevator arrived to take him upstairs. “Feelings of self-doubt and insignificance,” she said.

“I know there are many worse forms of sexual harassment, but doesn’t this still speak to character?” she said. “I don’t want money. I don’t need a lawsuit. I just want people to listen. How many women have to come forward? What will it take to get a response?”

The response that came was waiting every day on Crooks’s computer, so one morning back home in Ohio she woke up and walked downstairs to her laptop. The front door was locked, the shades were drawn, and she sat next to the dog she had recently bought with hopes that a pet might help reduce her anxiety. She navigated to Facebook. “Good morning, Rachel!” read a greeting at the top of her page, and then she clicked open her messages.

“Very unbelievable story,” read the first. “Try and get rich some other way.”

“You ignorant, attention seeking cow.”

“Nobody would touch you, especially not Trump. You look like a boy. A gun to your head would be good for our nation.”

She had tried changing the privacy settings on her Facebook page and logging off Twitter, but there was no way to barricade herself from so much hostility. It came into her email inbox at the tiny college in Ohio where she worked as a recruiter of international students. It came when she walked her dog around the block or took her nephews trick-or-treating. “So may stares and weird comments that give me social anxiety,” was how she explained it once to a friend, because now each interaction required a series of calculations. Two thirds of people in Seneca County had voted for Trump. Ninety-four percent of Trump supporters told pollsters that their views were “not impacted” by the sexual harassment allegations against him. So Crooks wondered: Did the majority of her friends, co-workers and neighbors think she was lying? Or, even worse in her mind, did they believe her but simply not care?

“An honest, timeless, values-first community” was how one tourism slogan described Seneca County, and Crooks had always believed those things to be true. Her father had worked 39 years as a mechanic at Whirlpool and then retired with a decent pension. Her sister was raising four children in the same converted farmhouse where Crooks had grown up. Everybody in town knew her family-- four generations of Crooks clustered within a few square blocks-- so a local newspaper had interviewed community members about Crooks’s allegations against Trump. “A fine, wholesome young girl,” her high school volleyball coach told the paper, and that seemed to Crooks like the most Ohio compliment of all. But then the story ended and the comments began, and Crooks kept reading because she knew some of the commenters, too.

“I’m a friend of the family. She’s lying.”

“If he was going to make a move on a woman, it wouldn’t be her!”

“We know Trump has class, so why would he waste his time on some average chick like this?”



In her “values-first” community, it now felt to Crooks as if politics had become a fissure that was always deepening, the facts distorted by both sides, until even her own family no longer agreed on what or whom to believe. Her parents and sister supported her, even if they disliked talking about politics. Her grandmother, a staunch conservative, hugged Crooks after reading the original article about Trump’s harassment in the New York Times but then sometimes talked admiringly about Trump. Another of her relatives was often posting laudatory stories about the president on Facebook and dismissing many of the attacks against him as purely political, until one day Crooks decided to email her.

“Your candidate of choice kissed me without my consent,” Crooks wrote, and then she began to wonder whether there was some way to tell her story, or some piece of evidence, that could change her relative’s mind. During one news conference, she had asked Trump to release the security videotapes from the 24th floor that day, but he never responded. She had not heard from him, or anyone representing him, since she came home from New York. “What can I ever do to prove this happened and that it impacted my life?” she said.

Maybe the proof was the email she had sent to her mother, from the Bayrock office in New York, at 1:27 that afternoon in 2006: “Hey Ma, my day started off rough…had a weird incident with Mr. Trump.”

Or the email she sent a few hours later to her sister at 3:05 p.m.: “I must just appear to be some dumb girl that he can take advantage of… ugh!

” Or the email she sent a few days after that to another relative: “Ah yes, the Donald kiss… very creepy man, let me tell you!”

Or the recorded conversation between Trump and Billy Bush on an Access Hollywood bus late in 2005, months before Crooks says she met Trump by the elevators: “You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful women. 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.”

“By all means, have your opinions,” Crooks wrote to her relative instead, because more and more she believed no version of her story could bridge the widening divide.

“It makes me ill, to be quite honest with you... when my own family members not only vote for but publicly defend this person,” she wrote. “For my own sanity, I will not engage you further on this.”

She has an issues page on her campaign website. On healthcare, for example, she wrote "Access to healthcare is a right, not a privilege. I have never understood why two people going to the same doctor might pay vastly different amounts for the same service. It’s a broken system, and we deserve better. Especially because the opioid epidemic has taken hold of our state, and Ohio leads the nation in accidental overdose deaths. We can’t go back to a time when preexisting conditions held people back from receiving care-- from preventive services to life-saving treatments. And we need to maintain Medicaid expansion so that our neighbors and friends, regardless of their income, have access to health care. But we must take a step further and fix our system so it works for everyone."

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

-by Noah

Is Señor Trumpanzee not just a pussy grabber? Obviously, Republicans have no problem with what Señor Trumpanzee is known for, but what if he's also a penis grabber? We all know how homophobic and transphobic Republicans are. Could that be the one thing that would make such people start to fall out of love with their big fat orange fascist?

I know it must be Killing Ann Coulter (not a book by Bill O'Reilly) that so many other loons like Steve Bannon, Trumpanzee, and, Stephen Miller have been getting so much extra attention this week. Poor Ann Coulter! It probably takes her back to her school days when all the other kids ran away form her so as not to get a bad case of Coulter Cooties. She longs for the days when she was a Republican hero. So, I guess it was only a matter of time before she played he #MeToo card. The thing is, although some have speculated about which equipment Ann was born with, this news will confuse and conflict the party of her choice.

But Ann, there is a party to whom such details don't matter. Too bad your personality and politics make you such an asshole.

Welcome To Waterbury: The City That Holds Secrets That Could Bring Down Trump-- A Guest Post By Andrew Kreig And Wayne Madsen

A woman who was allegedly sodomized and raped at the age of 12 along with at least one other underage girl by Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein at Epstein’s midtown Manhattan townhouse in 1993 is alive and trying to maintain obscurity from alt-right operatives who have identified her and her current residence.

The Wayne Madsen Report (WMR) and Justice Integrity Project (JIP) are revealing here for the first time the identity of “Maria,” who was identified as such in two 2016 federal civil lawsuits brought against Trump and Epstein by another underage victim of the pair, Katie Johnson (aka, "Jane Doe"). The product of a month-long investigation that took us to the site of the girl’s kidnapping in Waterbury, Connecticut, this information comes from confidential sources in multiple states. They have been pursuing the “Maria” story since the name and 1993 incident was first referenced in Johnson’s lawsuits. Johnson dropped the suit after she became the victim of physical threats by individuals who claimed to be Trump supporters, according to her account in court records.

The original tip came to WMR, which reported exclusively earlier this week with this column that Maria was the 12-year old child rape victim of Donald Trump's and convicted underage girl molester, Jeffrey Epstein's sex orgies at Epstein's midtown Manhattan mansion then owned by his friend Les Wexner, a billionaire retailing mogul. Maria was kidnapped on March 20, 1993, when she was 11-years old from the front of Nash’s Pizza in Waterbury. The girl's kidnappers were involved in a child trafficking ring that provided abductees to wealthy individuals like Trump and Epstein in Manhattan, according to our information.

The Waterbury Police Department has refused to provide us with a copy of the original police report on the abduction. It defers to Linda Wihbey, the city’s Corporation Counsel. On December 12, 2017, Wihbey made her views known in a phone call with Andrew Kreig of JIP, as Wayne Madsen listened. She said that she was ready to “welcome us to Waterbury” until she decided that our investigation was “hostile” to her and Waterbury’s interests. These suffered greatly some 17 years ago over a high-profile pedophilia incident involving the city’s Republican mayor.

Waterbury’s stance emerged from our request for the 1993 police report on Maria’s abduction, including any relevant witness statements provided to the police.

The site of “Maria’s” kidnapping in 1993, then known as Nash’s Pizza restaurant, since relocated

Waterbury reported 110,000 in population at the last census and is located 77 miles northeast of New York City.

In 1993, Maria lived with her mother and nine siblings in a Puerto Rican neighborhood in Waterbury, which is nicknamed “The Brass City” for its once-booming brass and clock factories. It is now suffering from urban blight, like many New England cities with abandoned factories.

Maria, whose father died in 1991, was reportedly abducted just moments after her mother entered the pizzeria while asking Maria to wait outside. The precise circumstances are among the secrets that police are withholding, thus limiting news coverage. The mother died in 2015.

One resident of the kidnapped girl's close-knit neighborhood told us that the circumstances always seemed strange to the family and neighbors, and yet almost no police or other interest has been apparent for many years. Our source also stated that Maria’s mother always felt that her daughter was alive and, at one time, was in New York City. Another source in Waterbury said that it was the belief by many neighborhood residents at the time of Maria’s abduction that she was kidnapped by a ring operating out of New York. “Those who took her [Maria] were not from Waterbury,” said one longtime Puerto Rican resident familiar with the case.

In the interest of responsible journalism, we are withholding Maria’s actual full name. A June 25, 2010 paper, titled “Protecting victims’ identities in press coverage of child victimization,” which was published by the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, spells out the concerns of releasing the identities of child sex victims without prior precautions being taken. The authors of the paper contend, “When the names of child victims and other identifying information appear in the media it can exacerbate trauma, complicate recovery, discourage future disclosures and inhibit cooperation with authorities for the children involved.”

Maria is still listed as a “missing person” by the Waterbury Police Department. The police missing person notification states that Maria was last seen at the corner of Walnut Street and Walnut Avenue at Nash’s Pizza. It adds that the girl “was 11-years-old when she went missing.”

Here is a development that proved startling in Maria’s neighborhood, including to at least one family member: She is alive.

Maria has been avoiding any public limelight since the Trump Organization discovered her actual identity, according to our sources. During the 2016 presidential campaign, there was some interest in the Maria story by major corporate media outlets, but they were intimidated by Trump Organization legal threats.

The incident helps illustrate the institutional cowardice and greed of many of the major news organizations and the danger that unprotected whistleblower/victims face when they share their stories with such journalists. Although the initial reporters and producers are usually very well-intentioned they work for conglomerates whose top executives realize that it’s typically safer not to antagonize the power structure.

That would be in this case a litigious billionaire Trump, who now influences, if not controls, a vast “law enforcement,” national security and broadcast federal regulatory apparatus.

The federal government delivers (or withholds) merger and tax approvals, for example, scrutiny over a host of other legal and regulatory issues, plus discretionary grants that can be vital to local authorities, particularly those with financial struggles like Waterbury. Beyond that, monied interests in the power structure have fostered private goons and trolls-- sometimes equipped with the trappings of legitimate law enforcement or journalism-- who can seek out whistleblowers, victims and reporters alike to set them up for vicious legal or extra-legal reprisals.

In the case of Katie Johnson, she alleged in lawsuits filed in federal courts first in California and then in New York that Trump knew that she was 13-years-old when he assaulted and raped her in 1993. Johnson said that it was Trump who initiated contact with her at four different parties at Epstein's residence in Manhattan. The mansion, shown below in a photo via Google Maps, was owned by the billionaire retailing magnate Les Wexner, who controls such companies as Victoria’s Secret.

Here is Johnson’s account, taken from her most recent lawsuit filed in Manhattan’s federal court:

She said that she was inveigled into the “party” scene after she was approached by an Epstein party “recruiter” while she was at the New York-New Jersey Port Authority Bus Terminal on 42nd Street in Manhattan. The recruiter suggested that she might become a model if she met the right people at a fashionable party. That was a typical approach used by Epstein’s recruiters, who leveraged his high-level contacts with fashion, modeling, photography, travel, political and entertainment figures to entice girls, tweens and teens, according to court records.

The Johnson lawsuit states that at their fourth encounter at an Epstein party: "Defendant Trump tied Plaintiff to a bed, exposed himself to Plaintiff, and then proceeded to forcibly rape Plaintiff. During the course of this savage sexual attack, Plaintiff loudly pleaded with Defendant Trump to stop but with no effect. Defendant Trump responded to Plaintiff’s pleas by violently striking Plaintiff in the face with his open hand and screaming that he would do whatever he wanted."

Johnson (shown in a screenshot with her face obscured) claimed that at two parties Epstein raped her once after she had been raped by Trump. During the second encounter with Epstein, Johnson stated that Epstein raped her "anally and vaginally despite her loud pleas to stop." She stated that Epstein attempted to strike her on the head "with his closed fists," while he angrily screamed that he [Epstein], rather than Trump, should have been the one who took the girl's virginity.

According to the suit, Trump told Johnson that if she ever revealed the sexual encounter with Trump, the girl and her family would be "physically harmed if not killed." Johnson also stated that Epstein periodically reiterated to her Trump's earlier threat that if she were to "reveal any of the details of his sexual and physical abuse of her or else," she and her family would be "seriously physically harmed, if not killed."

Trump Fights Back: All Lies and Fake News, He Says

Trump and his representatives have repeatedly insisted that any woman who alleges that he harassed or sexually assaulted her is lying. The Washington Post, among other outlets, reported that stance in All of the women who have accused Trump of sexual harassment are lying, the White House says, a story published on Oct. 26, 2017.

After filing her first complaint against Epstein and Trump in California on April 26, 2016, Johnson said that she began receiving threatening phone calls on her cell phone from blocked numbers. She refiled in New York. A courtroom hearing was scheduled for mid-December 2016 in federal court for the Southern District of Manhattan. U.S. District Judge Ronnie Abrams [pictured at right] said that she was requiring Epstein and Trump to appear before her in the Johnson lawsuit, an unusual requirement for a pre-trial hearing, especially in a civil case. Because of the threats, Johnson pulled her lawsuit just prior to the 2016 presidential election and no hearing occurred.

There are many pundits who will say from their comfortable perches that the withdrawal of this and similar lawsuits means there is nothing further to examine, especially if any flaw can be found or alleged involving the personality of a plaintiff, the supporting witnesses or lawyers. But that blame-the-victim conventional wisdom is being upended by the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements-- and is especially wrong-headed in this case for several important reasons.

First, there is substantial evidence that Epstein and Trump are notorious sexual predators and billionaire litigants who use threats and the legal system to their advantage. Epstein is a convicted pedophile who targeted junior high and high school girls, as described below.

Epstein was required to register as a convicted sex offender [pictured at left]. Trump has long been notorious as a lecher, telling ABC’s The View in 2006, “I've said if Ivanka weren't my daughter, perhaps I'd be dating her."

More recently in November, the Washington Post published in President Trump and accusations of sexual misconduct: The complete list extensive details of thirteen women (not including those alleging crimes only on social media or those like Katie Johnson who had withdrawn lawsuits) making accusations against him, along with names and details of corroborating witnesses. Wikipedia, under a heading Donald Trump sexual misconduct allegations, lists 15 claims as of this writing.

After underage sexual abuse allegations began surfacing during the failed campaign of GOP Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore, Ivanka Trump (shown on her Twitter portrait) said of Moore, “there’s a special place in hell for people who prey on children. She added, “I’ve yet to see a valid explanation and I have no reason to doubt the victims’ account.” Bannon, who supported Moore’s campaign, replied to Trump’s daughter in a December 2017 interview with Vanity Fair, “What about the allegations about her dad and that 13-year-old?” Bannon was referring, of course, to Katie Johnson.

Second, the vulnerability of sex abuse victims in their early teens from poor families requires special attention. Nowhere is that more poignant than in the case of the girl “Maria.” Police reports say that she was kidnapped at age 11 from her own neighborhood and, to all outward appearances, then disappeared off the face of the earth. In sum, the track record and power of these two particular defendants requires a deeper look at the allegations, particularly in light of the lessons learned from the #MeToo harassment and assault revelations this past fall regarding other powerful predators.

So, we return to the allegations in the “Jane Doe” (aka Katie Johnson) lawsuit despite the practice of pundits, lawyers, trolls, fanatics and thugs, many well-paid or fanatically ideological, using their varied skills to claim that there’s nothing to see or know. You be the judge, based on these lawsuit claims:

On July 23, 2016, "Joan Doe," a classmate of Johnson during the 1994-1995 school year, signed an affidavit avowing that Johnson had told her during the summer of 1994 about the sexual assaults by Epstein and Trump.

Another witness, “Tiffany Doe,” signed an affidavit in support of Johnson's suit on June 18, 2016. Tiffany Doe stated that she had been hired in 1990 by Epstein when she was 22 to "provide entertainment" for his various "guests." She further stated that Epstein hired her in 1991 as a "party planner" to, among other duties, entice "attractive adolescent women" to attend Epstein's parties. Tiffany Doe stated that she personally witnessed Trump's sexual assault and rape of Johnson during four encounters.

Johnson also stated in the suit that Trump told her that she "shouldn’t ever say anything if she didn’t want to disappear like Maria, a 12-year-old female that was forced to be involved in the third incident" with Trump. Johnson said she had not seen “Maria” after the third sexual encounter with Trump. Tiffany Doe said that she witnessed Johnson and 12-year old “Maria” perform oral sex on Trump.

Vendetta Against Puerto Rico?

There’s a larger story here. Trump's psychopathy of disinterest in Puerto Rico and its post-Hurricane Maria problems likely revolves around the fact that Maria hails from Puerto Rico. Trump’s addled ego may have reacted when Puerto Rico was struck by Hurricane Maria. It could well have reminded him that a 12-year old whom he had raped and knew as Maria knows details that could very well bring down him and his administration.

The Trump administration’s extreme disinterest in Puerto Rico’s recovery-- especially in comparison to post-hurricane rescue efforts for continental U.S. sites this fall-- has been reported by many news organizations. The national media reported it visually by showing his contemptuous hurling of paper towels to Islanders at a photo op soon after the disaster.

Waterbury's Secrets

In terms of solving the 1993 kidnapping, Waterbury Corporate Counsel Wihbey did reveal to us that about four or five years ago-- she said “around 2012 or 2013”-- there was some interest by “law enforcement” and “a few journalists” in the Maria missing person police report from 1993. Wihbey told us that the case remains under “active” investigation even though it has been a dormant “cold case” for several years. Originally, spokespersons for Waterbury Police Chief Vernon Riddick Jr. expressed no real opposition to releasing the police report, claiming that all that was needed was the chief’s concurrence.

Wihbey is pictured above at a Connecticut Freedom of Information hearing defending Waterbury’s insistence on retaining secret documents in another matter. It involved the details of a largely secret arrangement whereby Waterbury taxpayers paid former Republican Connecticut governor and ex-con John Rowland, a former Waterbury state assemblyman and congressman after he had been imprisoned on a federal political corruption charge in 2004.

Waterbury’s Democratic Mayor Neil O’Leary may continue to have good reason to be concerned about public interest in the abduction of Maria to provide sex for pedophiles like Trump and Epstein in New York.

Waterbury Mayor Neil O'Leary, center, was a witness in a high-profile Freedom of Information complaint in 2013 by Connecticut journalist and author Andy Thibault, right.

O’Leary was the Waterbury police chief (as shown below) when now-imprisoned Republican Mayor Phil Giordano (nicknamed Pedo Phil”) was arrested by the FBI as part of their investigation of payoffs to the mayor by Mafia building contractors. During court-authorized wiretaps of Giordano’s phones, the FBI became aware that the mayor was paying a female Puerto Rican prostitute named Guitana (“Gigi”) Jones for sex with her 10-year old niece and 8-year old daughter. Giordano and Rowland were once close political allies and Rowland’s cozy relationship with Mayor O’Leary has raised eyebrows in Connecticut.

Connecticut Gov. John Rowland, center, a former Waterbury assemblyman later imprisoned on corruption charges, and then Waterbury Mayor Philip Giordano, at right, meet in October 2000 at the exclusive Burning Tree Country Club in Greenwich

According to federal court records: The trysts between Mayor Giordano and the children took place over nine months in 2000 and 2001 in the mayor’s office, his official car, his home, a friend’s home, and his private law office. Giordano paid Jones $40 to $60 per visit. Giordano made special requests for the two girls on days when he knew they were off from school.

During 2000, Giordano, a former U.S. Marine and state assemblyman representing Waterbury, was the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate against then-Democrat Joe Lieberman. Giordano, married to an attractive heiress, also made no secret of his desire to become the vice president of the United States. In 2003, Giordano was sentenced to 37 years in a federal prison in Tucson, Arizona after his conviction of violating the civil rights of the two female children, using interstate devices (cellphones) to arrange the meetings, and conspiring with Jones to supply the children for sexual purposes.

Mafia Connections

It is not known how long Giordano [pictured above in police mug shot] was using his mayoralty and other political influence to arrange for sexual encounters with girls. In 1993, when Maria was abducted, Giordano had been a Republican state representative for Waterbury. Giordano’s mob-linked friend, Joseph Pontoriero, owner of Worth Construction Company, Inc. of Bethel, Connecticut, was also tied to a Mafia syndicate’s numerous concrete-pouring construction contracts in Manhattan and Atlantic City, New Jersey. Pontoriero provided Giordano with $8,300 in designer clothing and a $12,000 loan for a minivan in return for Waterbury contracting favors, federal authorities showed.

Trump's Genius

According to several major biographies, Trump grew his businesses while maintaining relationships with Mafia chieftains Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno (shown at right), the Genovese family crime underboss, and Paul Castellano, chief of the Gambino family. The Genovese and Gambino organizations, named after leaders in their heyday, have historically been the most powerful and dangerous of the New York City metro region’s five Mafia families. The construction firms they controlled, including S & A Concrete, poured concrete for Manhattan’s Trump Tower, Trump Plaza, and other Trump building projects in New York and Atlantic City. Trump’s Atlantic City construction projects also involved Philadelphia and South Jersey Mafia chief Nick “Little Nicky” Scarfo, who was regarded as vengeful and murderous at a level reaching psychotic proportion.

Trump’s association with Mafia bosses resulted from intermediary services provided by the infamous mobbed-up lawyer Roy Cohn (shown at left), someone also known for his prurient sexual interests involving young men. Cohn, who represented leaders in both the Genovese and Gambino mobs, died in 1986 from complications from AIDS. Before that, however, as Trump’s business attorney, friend and mentor, Cohn made the right “introductions” for Trump in the organized crime underground of the New York City area, including Connecticut.

It is very likely that Trump’s affectation for young girls involved compromising him with “favors” that were provided by mob elements in New York and elsewhere, such as Waterbury. And, considering Waterbury’s current obfuscation on providing official information on Maria’s abduction and Giordano’s mob ties and pedophile problems, concerned citizens might reasonably demand answers regarding basic information about the kidnapped girl-- as well as how those secrets relate to the city’s troubled past and current politics.

In Waterbury, federal authorities broke up the massive corruption scheme and documented Giordano’s compulsive sex obsession with teens and pre-teens. Meanwhile, Waterbury authorities apparently proceeded in an oblivious manner that, in the most charitable interpretation, resembled the acumen of Inspector Clouseau in the movies.

Eventually, the Italian Mafia would introduce Trump to the even more nefarious Russian Jewish mob, which was nestled around Brighton Beach, also known as “Little Odessa,” in Brooklyn.

WMR has reported extensively that it was from these quarters that Trump would be introduced to the money-laundering services of shady Eastern European, mostly Jewish, gangsters. These included Felix Sater, David Bogatin, Vyachelsav Ivankov, and the most dangerous mobster of them all-- Semion Mogilevich. These mobsters specialized in not only money laundering, but the other big threat to Trump’s presidency-- sex trafficking, including of underage girls. WMR's findings are summarized in a visual relationship chart of "Trump-Kushner-Sater-Manafort Global Syndicate Road Map" showing persons and entities that was first published last spring and is updated.

Helping to confirm the importance of this illicit network was former Trump Chief Strategist Steven Bannon’s remark quoted by author Michael Wolff in the Fire and Fury best-seller that Trump and his associates are highly vulnerable to money laundering charges in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing probe.

Epstein’s “Lolita Express”

Trump’s pedophile problems also extend to his Mar-a-Lago private estate and club in Palm Beach, Florida. In 2005, when a Florida mother accused Trump’s “good friend” Epstein with having her underage daughter “Mary” strip down and “massage” Epstein for $300, a barrage of subsequent civil lawsuits was brought against the billionaire investor, who started out his career as a seventh-grade teacher at the exclusive Dalton School in Manhattan from 1973 to 1975.

In a 2002 interview with New York Magazine, Trump said of his friend Epstein, “I've known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it-- Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

Trump’s 15-year relationship with Epstein put the alleged rapes of Katie Johnson and Maria well within the timeframe of their friendship.

Palm Beach police detectives led by Det. Joe Recarey and the FBI built up a criminal case against Epstein that soon involved over 100 “Jane Does” who accused the Palm Beach resident Epstein, a member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, with sexual assault.

One victim, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, claimed that she was 15 when Epstein’s chief procurer of young girls, Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the late newspaper press lord and Mossad operative Robert Maxwell, recruited her into “service” while she was a towel girl at Mar-a-Lago.

Giuffre said that the adjoining photo of her with Maxwell and Prince Andrew of Britain's royal family when she was 17 illustrates the time when she was being trafficked. Epstein, Maxwell and Buckingham Palace denied improprieties, and Giuffre settled a lawsuit against Epstein.

Some of the girls were 14-years-old at the time of Epstein’s alleged assaults at these venues: his Palm Beach El Brillo Way mansion (which is just a mile away from Mar-a-Lago), Epstein’s private Little Saint James Island in the U.S. Virgin Islands, his private Boeing 737, and his huge ranch in New Mexico. The other “Jane Does” in the civil cases against Epstein were identified in court documents with the initials of "L.M.," "E.W.," and "M.J."

The Sweetheart Deal Protecting Pervert Pedophiles

Under the Bush administration, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Alexander Acosta (shown at right), arranged a sweetheart plea deal for Epstein. The billionaire pervert served merely 13 months of a nighttime-only sentence in a minimum-security wing of the Palm Beach County prison for his misdemeanor guilty plea of soliciting sex from an underage female. The New York Post reported (Massage Maven out of prison) that Epstein was permitted to have a mistress whom Epstein had described as his "sex slave" visit him in jail 67 times.

Most shocking, Epstein was spared from any further Florida or federal charges in a non-prosecution agreement approved by Acosta in coordination with Epstein’s high-powered legal team, which included Florida attorney Jack Goldberger, Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz and former President Clinton's Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr, who was dean of Pepperdine School of Law beginning in 2004.

And, in yet another free ride for those VIPs who were present at Epstein’s orgies with underage girls, Acosta’s plea deal stipulated that neither Florida nor the federal government would charge anyone else for having sex with underage females. Normally, sweetheart plea deals are to encourage small fry to rat out higher-ups, not to protect everyone except one miscreant receiving a slap on the wrists.

The honest police in West Palm Beach were so outraged by the sellout that they risked firing by anonymously posting on the web details (redacted to remove names) of the shocking specifics of Epstein’s crimes against the girls, who were primarily of junior high and high school age. WMR has inspected the court record in criminal and civil cases, and identified 104 separate “Jane Doe” victims of Epstein and his ring in one case alone.

Ironies abound. Clinton and Prince Andrew of the United Kingdom's royal family were among Epstein's social circles. The former president while involved with Clinton Foundation activitiestook many documented flights on Epstein's luxury airplane, although no abuse claims have yet surfaced against him. Starr (shown in a portrait) would go on to become chancellor of Baylor University, where he would intone on the importance of moral instruction for college students, as we reported in the 2015 column Moralist Ken Starr Explains His Help For Billionaire Pervert Jeffrey Epstein. However, a massive sex scandal in football player recruitment, whereby students reported being raped after serving as hostesses for prospective student athletes, festered under his nose and would ultimately cost him his job.

Trump ultimately rewarded Acosta for his “deal” with Epstein by nominating him last year to become U.S. Secretary of Labor. Acosta was approved on a near-party line vote. Most Democrats were too timid to grill him on the Epstein plea deal. Republicans touted his Hispanic and “law enforcement” backgrounds. From this Trump post where Acosta serves as the supposed watchdog over the employment rights of workers, the Labor Secretary continues to serve as an ostensibly decent public servant and rare minority face in the Trump cabinet.

Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta, with his hand on a Bible and surrounded by family members, is sworn into office by ViP Mike Pence last year.

What's Next?

Let's think about the high stakes involved and the apparent lack of sustained scrutiny and public disclosure despite the #MeToo movment.

In this instance, the trail of Trump’s and Epstein’s pedophile sexual assaults on young girls is a long one. It extends from the greater Palm Beach area in Florida to Manhattan and, we believe, at least as far north as Waterbury, Connecticut. In most instances, substantial evidence points to law enforcement investigations that have been stymied by government cover-ups, witness intimidation, and monetary pay-offs to victims.

And now there are two new factors: One is an array of zealots, trolls and thugs determined to attack vulnerable victims, particularly to protect President Trump, the leader of their alt-right movement. Also, we see that an entire U.S. territory, Puerto Rico, apparently is suffering from continued storm damage and loss of life because an addled but vengeful Trump apparently conflates a 12-year old Puerto Rican girl whom he knew as Maria with the devastating hurricane of the same name.

Paul Ryan's Poor Leadership Is Making The Congressional Sex Scandals Even Worse, By Politicizing Them In A Partisan Way

Paul Ryan was clearly too frightened to say anything about the multiple charges of rape and predatory sexual behavior against Señor Trumpanzee but, when he was bashing Michigan Democrat John Conyers-- who had just resigned-- on TV yesterday, you might have expected him to also mention Texas Republican Blake Farenthold-- who refuses to resign. Farenthold still insists he "didn't do anything wrong" but he'll pay back the $84,000 in taxpayer money paid out to his victim, Lauren Greene, after she sued him. Farenthold destroyed her 9 year Capitol Hill career when she exposed him as a pervert. As Politico's Rachel Bade reported this week "Greene’s budding career imploded, she said, the minute she accused Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Texas) of sexually harassing her. Since the summer of 2014, when she says Farenthold fired her for raising concerns about a hostile work environment, Greene has been unable to land a full-time job. She’s making $15 an hour working temporary gigs for a homebuilder. She baby-sits on the side to earn extra cash. Her family has had to support her financially. And Greene, now 30, has left D.C., with no illusions that she will ever work in politics again." Isn't that something Ryan should be addressing, instead of just castigating a Democrat who did resign-- and who didn't destroy anyone's career? [So far only 2 Republican members of Congress-- Mia Love (UT) and Barbara Comstock (VA)-- have demanded that Blake Farenthold resign. And Trump... no one's bringing that up anymore-- except Jeff Merkley-- are they?]

Yesterday, in the midst of the growing scandal, Quinnipiac released a new poll specifically addressing sexual assault, which finds that 47% of American women (and 17% of American men) say they've been sexually assaulted. The question was "Have you ever been sexually assaulted, meaning someone touched you in an inappropriate, sexual manner without your consent, or not?" 37% who say they were sexually assaulted say it happened at work and 19% say it happened at school.

The media get the best grades for how it is handling sexual harassment and sexual assault in its industry, as Americans approve 48 - 42 percent. Approval for other groups are negative:

• 21 - 60 percent for how the Republican Party is handling sexual harassment and sexual assault in politics;
• 28 - 50 percent for the Democratic Party;
• 38 - 51 percent for the entertainment industry.

Americans disapprove 63 - 22 percent of the way President Donald Trump is handling sexual harassment and sexual assault. Republicans approve 55 - 24 percent, the only party, gender, age or racial group to approve.

It is hypocritical for President Trump to criticize men accused of sexual harassment, 73 percent of Americans say, while 16 percent say he has a right to criticize these men.

The U.S. Congress should investigate accusations of sexual harassment against President Trump, Americans say 70 - 25 percent.

Turning The Presidential Race Into An Open-Pit Sewer... That's The Donald

The other day, anti-Trump Republican David Brooks wrote, of the debate, that Hillary "behaved in the normal manner on Sunday night. But Donald Trump did not. Trump treated his questioners as unrelatable automatons and delivered his answers to the void, even when he had the chance to seem sympathetic to an appealing young Islamic woman. That underlines the essential loneliness of Donald Trump. Trump seems to him to be a man incapable of making human connection. "He is essentially adviser-less, friendless. His campaign team is made up of cold mercenaries at best and Roger Ailes at worst. His party treats him as a stench it can’t yet remove." Brooks has come to pity him.

Imagine if you had to go through a single day without sharing kind little moments with strangers and friends.

Imagine if you had to endure a single week in a hate-filled world, crowded with enemies of your own making, the object of disgust and derision.

You would be a twisted, tortured shrivel, too, and maybe you’d lash out and try to take cruel revenge on the universe. For Trump this is his whole life.

Trump's excuse for human connection is the adrenalin-pumping adulation at his monstrous hate rallies. Like him, the deplorables-- what I've been calling, sadly, "life's losers" all cycle-- also want to "lash out and try to take cruel revenge on the universe."

Imagine you are Trump. You are trying to bluff your way through a debate. You’re running for an office you’re completely unqualified for. You are chasing some glimmer of validation that recedes ever further from view.

Your only rest comes when you are insulting somebody, when you are threatening to throw your opponent in jail, when you are looming over her menacingly like a mafioso thug on the precipice of a hit, when you are bellowing that she has “tremendous hate in her heart” when it is clear to everyone you are only projecting what is in your own.

Trump’s emotional makeup means he can hit only a few notes: fury and aggression. In some ways, his debate performances look like primate dominance displays-- filled with chest beating and looming growls. But at least primates have bands to connect with, whereas Trump is so alone, if a tree fell in his emotional forest, it would not make a sound.

It’s all so pathetic.

Another anti-Trump Republican operative, Stuart Stevens, tweeted last night that "the only thing between Trump and a van by the river with Free Candy on the side is his inherited wealth." A day earlier, Chuck Todd noted that the Republican civil war is shaking the party to its foundations, and less than a month before the election.

According to the poll, two-thirds of GOP voters-- 67%-- say that Republican congressional candidates should continue to support Donald Trump after his lewd 2005 comments about women. Another 9% of Republican voters say these GOP candidates should no longer support Trump, and an additional 14% believe they should call on him to drop out of the presidential race. While that overall 67%-23% margin seems like good news for Trump, you can't win a national election when nearly a quarter of your party thinks its candidates should dump Trump. Maybe more importantly, if you're a Republican candidate who DOES want to discard Trump, you have two-thirds of your party's voters disagreeing with you. It's an unsustainable position for the Republican Party - and it explains why Republican members of Congress up for re-election are so conflicted about how to thread this needle.

Trump has given up on winning. It's now all about destruction-- dragging Hillary into the open sewer he lives in, wrecking the Republican Party that never really embraced him, and getting revenge against anyone who he perceived to be his enemies. Yesterday, Monica Langley, reporting for the Wall Street Journal wrote that Trump is doubling down on the far right-populism that Bannon is feeding him, a strategy aimed directly at the deplorables that will further alienate women, minorities, independents and mainstream conservatives. They're hoping to turn the last 3 weeks into something so ugly that turnout will be depressed and only the deplorables will both voting. He's turning his campaign into even more of a full-time attack machine with a total scorched-earth strategy. "The decision," wrote Langley, "means that a campaign already marked by intensely personal attacks is primed to grow even uglier in the remaining four weeks. Mr. Trump plans to keep up a relentless assault on Mrs. Clinton... [Trump's] core supporters don’t make up a majority of the electorate, and most analysts see no path to victory unless he adds to them, even if Mrs. Clinton’s vote total is driven down. And a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows him trailing the Democratic nominee by nine percentage points among likely voters."

Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist who worked on the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney and George W. Bush, said Mr. Trump’s approach would drive turnout among his base, “but alienating his own party and swing voters won’t grow his vote. His remarks and tactics can have the adverse effect of energizing the Democratic base.”

Last night the NY Times reported that Jessica Leeds, now 74, was assaulted by Trump on a plane was she was much younger.

About 45 minutes after takeoff, she recalled, Mr. Trump lifted the armrest and began to touch her.

According to Ms. Leeds, Mr. Trump grabbed her breasts and tried to put his hand up her skirt.

“He was like an octopus,” she said. “His hands were everywhere.”

She fled to the back of the plane. “It was an assault,” she said.

She was hardly the only one. Rachel Crooks was a 22 year old receptionist working in Trump Tower when Trump attacked her in front of an elevator. Other women have spoken to other media outlets about Trump's inappropriate behavior towards women.

In a phone interview on Tuesday night, a highly agitated Mr. Trump denied every one of the women’s claims.

“None of this ever took place,” said Mr. Trump, who began shouting at The Times reporter who was questioning him. He said that The Times was making up the allegations to hurt him and that he would sue the news organization if it reported them.

“You are a disgusting human being,” he told the reporter as she questioned him about the women’s claims.

Trump is threatening to sue the NY Times again. A Trump flack, Jason Miller, released this statement from Trump Tower:

This entire article is fiction, and for the New York Times to launch a completely false, coordinated character assassination against Mr. Trump on a topic like this is dangerous. To reach back decades in an attempt to smear Mr. Trump trivializes sexual assault, and it sets a new low for where the media is willing to go in its efforts to determine this election.

It is absurd to think that one of the most recognizable business leaders on the planet with a strong record of empowering women in his companies would do the things alleged in this story, and for this to only become public decades later in the final month of a campaign for president should say it all.

How creepy is this? Especially if you have a young daughter? I wonder if craven Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte wants to go on TV again and look into the camera and tell New Hampshire voters without blinking that she thinks Donald J. Trump would make a good role model for their children.

On an April 11, 2005, Howard Stern show, Donald Trump bragged about some of the special perks he enjoyed while owner of the Miss USA pageant. They came not in a locker room but a dressing room.

"I'll go backstage before a show and everyone's getting dressed and ready and everything else," he said. "And you know, no men are anywhere. And I'm allowed to go in because I'm the owner of the pageant. And therefore I'm inspecting it."

Said Stern: "You're like a doctor."

Responded Trump: "Is everyone OK? You know they're standing there with no clothes. And you see these incredible looking women. And so I sort of get away with things like that."

...According to Tasha Dixon, Miss Arizona of 2001, there was more inspecting than doctoring.

In an interview with the station, she described her experience with Trump as a contestant that year in a dressing room where she and others were changing into bikinis:

"He just came strolling right in. There was no second to put a robe on or any sort of clothing or anything. Some girls were topless. Others girls were naked.

"Our first introduction to him was when we were at the dress rehearsal and half naked changing into our bikinis.

"To have the owner come waltzing in, when we're naked, or half naked, in a very physically vulnerable position and then to have the pressure of the people that worked for him telling us to go fawn all over him, go walk up to him, talk to him, get his attention."

She suggested that such opportunities were among the reasons Trump owned beauty pageants.

"I'm telling you Donald Trump owned the pageant for the reasons to utilize his power to get around beautiful women. Who do you complain to? He owns the pageant. There's no one to complain to. Everyone there works for him."

Maybe Monday she'll be on MSNBC so Joe Scarborough can savage her. (You're aware he slithered away from a murder investigation by resigning from Congress, right?) Oh... and the Greek Nazi Party, Golden Dawn, endorsed Trump today.

Trump's ascendency within his party drove George Will to such despondency that he not only refused to back Trump, it resigned from the GOP and re-registered as an independent. A couple of days ago he told his Washington Post readers, once again, that Trump is too disgusting for any self-respecting human being to support. "His sexual loutishness is a sufficient reason for defeating him," wrote Will, "but it is far down a long list of sufficient reasons. But if it-- rather than, say, his enthusiasm for torture even “if it doesn’t work,” or his ignorance of the nuclear triad-- is required to prompt some Republicans to have second thoughts about him, so be it."

For example, Sen. Richard Burr, a North Carolinian seeking a third term, represents a kind of Republican judiciousness regarding Trump. Having heard the tape and seen Trump’s “apology” (Trump said, essentially: My naughty locker-room banter is better than Bill Clinton’s behavior), Burr solemnly said: “I am going to watch his level of contrition over the next few days to determine my level of support.” North Carolinians will watch with bated breath as Burr, measuring with a moral micrometer, carefully calibrates how to adjust his support to Trump’s unfolding repentance. Burr, who is chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has not received this nugget of intelligence: Contrition is not in Trump’s repertoire. Why should it be? His appetites, like his factoids, are self-legitimizing.

Trump is a marvelously efficient acid bath, stripping away his supporters’ surfaces, exposing their skeletal essences. Consider Mike Pence, a favorite of what Republicans devoutly praise as America’s “faith community.” Some of its representatives, their crucifixes glittering in the television lights, are still earnestly explaining the urgency of giving to Trump, who agreed that his daughter is “a piece of ass,” the task of improving America’s coarsened culture.

...Trump should stay atop the ticket, for four reasons. First, he will give the nation the pleasure of seeing him join the one cohort, of the many cohorts he disdains, that he most despises-- “losers.” Second, by continuing to campaign in the spirit of St. Louis, he can remind the nation of the useful axiom that there is no such thing as rock bottom. Third, by persevering through Nov. 8 he can simplify the GOP’s quadrennial exercise of writing its post-campaign autopsy, which this year can be published Nov. 9 in one sentence: “Perhaps it is imprudent to nominate a venomous charlatan.” Fourth, Trump is the GOP’s chemotherapy, a nauseating but, if carried through to completion, perhaps a curative experience.