A woman from Palm Springs, Florida, told the Palm Beach Post in an interview published Wednesday night that in 2003, Donald Trump groped her at his Florida resort Mar-A-Lago.
Mindy McGillivray, 36, said that while accompanying a friend photographing a Ray Charles concert at Mar-A-Lago, Donald Trump grabbed her butt. She told the Palm Beach Post that she and her friend, photographer Ken Davidoff, were standing on a pavilion behind the main building while Ray Charles was leaving the concert, with Trump and his then-fiancée Melania to their immediate left.
“All of a sudden I felt a grab, a little nudge. I think it’s Ken’s camera bag, that was my first instinct. I turn around and there’s Donald. He sort of looked away quickly. I quickly turned back, facing Ray Charles, and I’m stunned,” McGillivray told the Palm Beach Post.
She recalled saying to her self, ‘’‘OK, am I going to say something now and make a scene or be quiet?’ I chose to stay quiet.’’ She never reported the incident to the police.
McGillivray said she does not believes someone just bumped into her accidentally.
“This was a pretty good nudge. More of a grab,’’ she told the Palm Beach Post. “It was pretty close to the center of my butt. I was startled. I jumped.’’
Davidoff remembers McGillivray recounting the incident that night. He said she pulled him aside and said, “‘Donald just grabbed my ass!’’ He said he did not witness the alleged groping but that he never doubted McGillivray’s story.
She said she had encountered Trump two years earlier at Mar-A-Lago, when she said Trump flirted with her briefly.
McGillivray told the Palm Beach Post that she was leaving the bathroom when “Donald caught me right before I headed downstairs. He goes, ‘It’s a cool evening, isn’t it?’’’
“He had this debonair tone. He was totally flirting,’’ she said. “And then here comes Melania to save the day. She sees me. She had this shawl on because it was cold on New Year’s. And she whips the shawl behind her neck and storms off into the bathroom. I made a quick pivot and went straight downstairs and he went after her.’’
She told the Palm Beach Post that after Trump denied during the debate that he had ever groped a woman, as he bragged about in a 2005 tape released last week, she started to consider speaking up about the incident. She then reached out to the Palm Beach Post and the Hillary Clinton campaign about her story.
McGillivray’s allegations follow a New York Times report in which two women accused Trump of groping them years ago. The Trump campaign responded quickly, saying that the Times’ report was “fiction.”
