Amy Dorris tried not to watch too much news last week as Stormy Daniels gave her courtroom account of sex with Donald Trump. But little details from Daniels’s story have stuck with her, she said.
Dorris said Trump was suddenly kissing her and groping all over her body, despite her protests. She first disclosed her account publicly in 2020 after years of hesitation. Trump at the time denied the allegation through a lawyer. Dorris said she lost friends, shut down her social media and left her house for months over worries about her safety and privacy.
Now, Dorris and some other women who had publicly accused Trump of kissing or touching them inappropriately — sometimes alleging assault — are watching his campaign to return to public office with alarm. They are confiding in one another, following Trump’s trials together and occasionally talking over Zoom. Despite a national reckoning with sexual misconduct shortly after Trump’s 2016 election, they feel the former president is politically more impervious than ever to their claims.
More than a dozen women have accused Trump, who is on course to be the Republican nominee for president for a third straight time, of sexual assault or aggressive, unwanted advances they said left them feeling violated. Trump or his representatives have denied all of the accusations and have sought to undermine the credibility of the accusers. The accounts span several decades and some have resurfaced in the criminal and civil trials he has faced as he seeks to return to the White House. Many of the allegations first emerged publicly in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign, and Trump argued that they were politically motivated.
“Do you not believe us?” Dorris asked of Trump supporters this past week. “Or do we not matter?”
Her mother said in 2020 that Dorris told her about the U.S. Open incident shortly after it happened. A friend said then that Dorris had first relayed her account of the incident 12 or 13 years earlier.
“Where is his accountability?” Dorris asked, speaking of Trump.
Trump is barred by a court order in his ongoing criminal trial, which is unrelated to Dorris, from responding publicly to witnesses such as Daniels — a prohibition his lawyers have complained is deeply unfair as he campaigns for president. “This Judge has taken away my Constitutional Right to FREE SPEECH,” Trump wrote recently on social media, though such gag orders are common in criminal cases. His case centers on charges of falsifying records related to a hush money payment made to Daniels in 2016. Trump has said he did not have sex with Daniels.
The Trump campaign declined to comment for this story. Todd Blanche, an attorney for Trump, sent a letter to The Washington Post on Saturday asserting that the previously reported claims by women against Trump were “false and defamatory — as well as old, and strongly refuted.” He argued that the gag order “unlawfully restricts” Trump from responding to The Post’s reporting.
“The gag order is so overbroad and illegal that it prohibits President Trump from causing us, as his attorneys, from addressing the central tenant of your ‘story,’” Blanche wrote. He added that he planned “to initiate litigation should the Washington Post run the story maliciously defaming and denigrating President Trump.” The judge overseeing his trial has ruled that Trump has violated the gag order 10 times, resulting in $10,000 in fines.
A jury in another New York case last year found Trump liable for sexual abuse. E. Jean Carroll, a longtime advice columnist, had accused Trump in 2019 of sexually assaulting her in an upscale department store in the mid-1990s. Another jury this year ordered Trump to pay Carroll more than $80 million for calling her a liar and defaming her. Trump vehemently denies Carroll’s account and is appealing.
Eight years ago, a video of Trump bragging about being able to grab women “by the p---y” threatened to sink his first campaign. A flood of allegations followed that infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, sometimes backed up by the accounts of confidants and old emails. “Had a weird incident with Mr. Trump,” one woman, Rachel Crooks, emailed her mother in 2006, on the day she says the former president kissed her out of nowhere after she introduced herself at Trump Tower. A few days later to another relative: “Ah yes, the Donald kiss … very creepy man, let me tell you!”
Yet while other powerful men have retreated from public life following sexual assault allegations, Trump is everywhere — in the news, on the campaign trail and in a New York courtroom, where Daniels’s testimony brought back uncomfortable emotions for some of his alleged victims.
Daniels, an adult-film actress, told the jury that she accepted an invitation to Trump’s hotel suite after a golf event in 2006, and that they had sex there. In her descriptions in court, Daniels at times expressed that she did not feel in control during their encounter. She said she felt she had “misread” the situation and initially said she had to leave; could not remember how exactly she ended up on the bed; was concerned Trump did not use a condom; and felt an “imbalance of power.”
Daniels said she did not resist, was not forced to have sex and was not under the influence of drugs or alcohol. But Trump’s legal team protested that parts of her testimony amounted to a “dog-whistle for rape” and argued, unsuccessfully, that Trump’s gag order should be loosened so that he could respond. They noted past instances where Daniels has not suggested the same lack of agency — for instance, a 2011 magazine interview that described her and Trump starting to have sex without mentioning, as she did in court, a gap in her memory and her vision briefly growing “black.” Daniels said that story was abbreviated.
“It almost defies belief that we are here for a records case,” Blanche said in court Thursday. “This is not a case about sex.”
For Karena Virginia, who in 2016 accused Trump of touching her breast outside a different U.S. Open tournament in 1998, the response to her and other women’s allegations has been more traumatic than the incident itself. At some points over the past week, she said, “I felt myself very frozen.” When she heard people dismissing the behavior Daniels described, she said, it reminded her of how she and other women felt shrugged off.
“It’s the responses — it’s the overhearing the conversations in the grocery store or even just when I dropped off some paperwork at a doctor’s office and the receptionist was just chatting with me and saying” — in reference to the trial where Daniels testified — “how, you know, men will be boys,” Virginia said.
In 2018, when he was president, Trump called Daniels “horseface.” He has dismissed some of his female accusers in similar terms, saying they “would not be my first choice.” Speaking of Carroll in 2019, Trump said, “Not my type.”
Trump’s New York trial will not adjudicate any claims of sexual misconduct, and prosecutors have emphasized in court that Daniels is not alleging assault. Instead, they are trying to prove that Trump falsified business records to cover up reimbursements to lawyer Michael Cohen, who had paid Daniels. Yet the prosecution has argued that Trump was motivated to buy Daniels’s silence because his campaign was afraid of how female voters might react to her account after the publication of the “Access Hollywood” tape.
To Dorris, the case carries some measure of the accountability she has been seeking.
“We’re looking to E. Jean and Stormy for that, because they’re being heard right now,” she said.
‘We’ve been emailing each other’
The accusations against Trump span decades but are concentrated well before his political career. They come from women who are often decades younger than Trump. Some knew Trump socially or through work; others said they were total strangers.
Most, though not all, kept their allegations to themselves or a small circle until at least 2016. Their political backgrounds vary, they say, but many are eager to see Trump defeated in 2024. (One woman, Jennifer Murphy — who described a sudden, unexpected kiss as she left a meeting with Trump in 2005 but brushed it off as inoffensive — said in a brief phone call this past week that she remains a supporter.)
Many of the women have gotten in touch since publicly accusing Trump. Some of them gathered on Zoom on the night of the 2020 election and again in January 2021 to celebrate President Biden’s inauguration. At another, more recent catch-up, they found themselves discussing a new setback to the #MeToo movement that exploded in 2017 and elevated stories of sexual assault: A New York state appeals court decision last month to overturn Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 rape conviction.
This past week, some of them discussed Daniels’s testimony together.
“We’ve been emailing each other, saying ‘Oh my God, she feels similar to how many of us felt,’” said Natasha Stoynoff. In October 2016, Stoynoff wrote that Trump pushed her against a wall and aggressively kissed her as she visited Mar-a-Lago to interview him and his wife for People magazine. Several people said Stoynoff confided in them at the time. Trump said she was lying.
Stoynoff said she was surprised at how emotional she became as she testified last year in Carroll’s lawsuit against Trump, to offer an account that echoed Carroll’s. Trump was not present, she said — in contrast to the criminal trial underway in Manhattan, where he must sit and watch.
“I was trying to be as calm as possible,” Stoynoff said. “Somehow I was taken right back to that moment, 2005 … I remembered how I felt that day — completely vulnerable and violated and shocked.”
She cried on the stand.
A long trail of allegations
Carroll had accused Trump of sexually assaulting her at a Bergdorf Goodman. She said Trump recognized her and asked her to help pick out a gift, then attacked her in a dressing room. She sued Trump for battery and defamation recently under a New York law that lifted the statute of limitations on sexual assault allegations and briefly allowed victims to pursue allegations that would otherwise be too old. The jury was asked to decide whether Carroll’s claims were more likely true than not.
Denying Carroll’s account in a deposition, Trump argued that “if it did happen, it would have been reported within minutes.”
At a friend’s house last May, Stoynoff saw the news there was a verdict in the civil case and rushed to turn on the TV. Soon it flashed across the screen: The jury sided with Carroll. “Literally we jumped up and down. We hugged each other. We cried a bit,” Stoynoff said. Months later, when another jury dramatically raised the amount of money Trump was ordered to pay, Stoynoff said she toasted Carroll with friends at Bergdorf Goodman.
But Stoynoff and other women recognize that there will always be a large part of the country that either does not believe them or does not give their accounts much weight.
That Trump could return to the White House is a “nightmare,” said Jessica Leeds, who also testified at Carroll’s civil trial and said Trump had groped her “out of the blue” on a plane in the 1970s. Trump said the incident never happened. Like many women, Leeds publicly accused Trump in 2016 after he denied ever engaging in the kind of actions he described on the “Access Hollywood” tape.
“I would just be so happy if he would just get out of the political life and go away,” Leeds said this past week.
Trump faced some allegations long before his 2016 campaign. Jill Harth sued Trump in the 1990s alleging relentless unwanted advances and touching while she and her then-boyfriend were pursuing business opportunities with Trump.
She has said she dropped her lawsuit as a condition of settling a separate suit — brought by the company she and her boyfriend ran — against Trump for breach of contract. When her story resurfaced in 2016, Trump denied her claims through a lawyer. His aides noted that Harth had recently expressed support for Trump, reaching out to offer makeup services on the campaign trail. Harth said that outreach was “not well thought out.”
Kristin Anderson — who in 2016 accused Trump of reaching up her skirt on a couch as she talked to other people at a Manhattan nightspot in the 1990s — said there is more awareness now of how many women “have an assault story that they were ashamed to reveal.” Trump also denied her allegation. She wrote in a text this past week: “We now see that we are not alone, but have the truth of armies of women that carry in our hearts the pain and suffering of the same story.”
Carroll is not the only woman to pursue her allegations recently in court. Summer Zervos, a former “Apprentice” contestant, also sued Trump for defamation after he called her sexual assault allegations lies. But she dropped the case in 2021, with attorneys saying that she “no longer wishes to litigate against the defendant and has secured the right to speak freely about her experience.” (She declined to speak with The Post for this story.)
One of the accusers, Jessica Drake, is also an adult-film actress and has said she was with Daniels during some interactions with Trump. She said she brought other women up to Trump’s hotel room with her at the Lake Tahoe golf tournament where Daniels and Trump met in 2006 so she wouldn’t be alone with him and that Trump “kissed all of us on the lips,” gave “full-body contact hugs” and later tried to pay her to return to his room.
When Drake made her allegations at a 2016 news conference, Trump’s campaign called them ridiculous and said Trump did not know her.
Drake did not respond to a request for comment. But as Daniels took the stand on Tuesday morning, Drake appeared to be thinking about her.
“sending the best, strongest vibes out there today. get him.” she wrote on the social media site X, adding a lightning bolt.
