A sixth woman has come forward to accuse Donald Trump of sexual misconduct since he denied ever grabbing and kissing women without their consent in Sunday’s presidential debate.
In an account published Friday in the Washington Post, Kristin Anderson alleged that Trump reached his hand under her skirt and touched her vagina through her underwear while seated beside her at a crowded Manhattan nightclub in the early 1990s.
Anderson said she had not spoken with Trump beforehand and that she leapt up from the couch where they were seated once he touched her.
“It wasn’t a sexual come-on,” she told the Post. “I don’t know why he did it. It was like just to prove that he could do it, and nothing would happen. There was zero conversation. We didn’t even really look at each other. It was very random, very nonchalant on his part.”
The Trump campaign flatly denied the story in a statement to the Post.
“Mr. Trump strongly denies this phony allegation by someone looking to get some free publicity. It is totally ridiculous,” Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks told the newspaper in an emailed statement.
Anderson joins a growing number of women who have accused the Republican nominee of inappropriate sexual conduct in the week since the Post published a leaked 2005 video in which Trump bragged on a hot mic about using his fame to take advantage of women.
“When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy,” Trump said in the tape. “You can do anything.”
Many of the women, including Anderson, said they came forward after Trump said the comments were just “locker room banter” and insisted in the second presidential debate that he had never acted on his words.
The Trump campaign has charged that the women are working in collaboration with the media and Hillary Clinton’s campaign to derail his presidential bid. They have responded by resurfacing the accounts of women who have accused Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct.
Yet Anderson, now a photographer living in Southern California, told the Post that she plans to vote for neither candidate. The Post said voter records show that she switched her voter registration from Democrat to “no party preference” in May.
Instead, she said she came forward to contradict the “awful message” that men can just grope women they do not know “on the sly, like you’re some kind of stuffed animal on the couch.”
The Post reported that a journalist who knew of her story from an acquaintance contacted Anderson. After several days of deliberation and Trump’s denial of the other sexual harassment allegations, Anderson said she agreed to make her story public, knowing she would face intense public scrutiny.
Post reporter Karen Tumulty said she spoke to other acquaintances who Anderson told the story to over the years for corroboration.
Trump’s team has claimed to have evidence that contradicts his accuser’s claims but has not released that evidence.
