Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, former US President Donald Trump has found himself embroiled in yet another controversy over his alleged “violent” sexual desires. This time, a woman testified that Trump groped her like “40 billion hands” on an airline flight in the late 1970s.
Jessica Leeds, now enjoying her 80s, told jurors on Tuesday in a civil lawsuit stemming from Carroll’s lawsuit that Trump grabbed her chest and tugged at her skirt as they walked on a New York City-bound But in first class they were sitting side by side. Jet. After a few seconds, she said, she broke free of Trump, told him “I don’t need it” and fled to the back of the plane.
Leeds, who is from Asheville, North Carolina, claimed that in her late 30s, she worked in sales and sat in a coach on a Braniff Airways flight from Dallas or Atlanta to New York’s LaGuardia Airport. Was sitting He remembered that it was 1979. According to her, a flight attendant invited her to sit next to Trump in the only empty aisle seat in the first class cabin.
Trump introduced himself, Leeds said, but she did not know who he was at the time. Working as a real estate developer, Trump had not yet achieved the heights of his fame and was still a few years away from opening Trump Tower in Manhattan.
“There was no conversation. It was like out of the blue. It was like a tussle,” testified Leeds. “He was trying to kiss me, trying to pull me towards him. He was holding my breasts. It was like he had 40 billion hands. It was like a tug of war between the two of us.”
“Trump kissed me and groped me”
Leeds said she sat with Trump for several hours and ate a nice, first-class meal, but their conversation was otherwise forgettable. Then, she said, “all of a sudden Trump decided to kiss me and grope me.” Leeds said she fought back because Trump seemed more aggressive, pressing his weight into her, pushing her seat and pinning her into it. He said none of the passengers intervened and none of the employees of the now-defunct airline came to his rescue.
“When he started putting his hand up my skirt, I felt powerless. I managed to get out of my seat and came back to my seat in the coach. I don’t think a word or sound was made by either of us,” Leeds recalled. The encounter, she said, “seemed to last forever, but it was probably only a few seconds.”
Why did Leeds decide to keep quiet?
After landing in New York, Leeds said she stayed on the plane until everyone else had left to avoid Trump again. She said she held the incident to herself as one of “the rigors of the journey”.
She didn’t report it to the airline, the police, or her boss because, she said, it was an era when “women didn’t complain about things in the workplace.”
A few years later, Leeds said she saw Trump at a Manhattan gala with his first wife, Ivana, who was pregnant. But Leeds said nothing. Instead, he told jurors that it was Trump who piped in. She recalled him using a crass word in identifying her as the woman “from the aeroplane”.
What does Trump say?
Leeds first went public with her account of the alleged airplane attack in the final weeks of Trump’s 2016 campaign, telling jurors that she decided to do so because she was “furious” about Trump’s claim in a debate that He never touched women against their will. ,
Trump, a Republican, has repeatedly denied the women’s claims. He says the allegations are a politically motivated effort to tarnish his reputation and deprive him of the White House. Notably, author E. Jean used similar language in denying the allegations, this time around Leeds, as in Carroll’s rape allegations, telling supporters at a 2016 rally, “Trust me, she’s my Wouldn’t be the first choice.”
(with inputs from agencies)