Because Trump has been accused by at least twenty-six women and teenagers of either sexual abuse, sexual misconduct, or rape

These are most of the assaults reported by Trump’s accusers. Some of the victims were teenagers at the time. It should be noted that these are only the women who chose to come forth and accuse a powerful man. According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, 63 percent of sexual assaults are not reported to police.

1. Advice columnist E. Jean Carroll claimed that Trump sexually assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room. Carroll wrote that she ran into Trump at the revolving-door entrance of the department store sometime during the fall of 1995 or spring of 1996. He asked for her advice on buying a present for “a girl.” 

While she was changing in the dressing room, Trump lunged at her, pushed her against the wall, placed his mouth on her lips, and pulled down her tights. “The next moment,” she wrote, “still wearing correct business attire, shirt, tie, suit jacket, overcoat, he opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway—or completely, I’m not certain—inside me. It turns into a colossal struggle.”

In 2023, a jury awarded Carroll $5 million in damages for her battery and defamation claims against Trump. Asked on its verdict sheet whether Carroll, seventy-nine, had proven “by a preponderance of the evidence” that “Mr. Trump sexually abused Ms. Carroll,” the jury checked the box that said, “yes.” 

2. During divorce proceedings with Donald Trump, his first wife, Ivana Trump, told lawyers that she was raped by him. In Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump, author Harry Hurt III recounted the testimony Ivana Trump gave during her and Donald Trump’s divorce in the early nineties. According to Hurt’s retelling of it, Ivana relayed a horribly violent incident that, during the testimony, she called “rape.”

Hurt’s text portrayed the assault as a reaction to Trump’s botched scalp reduction surgery. “Your doctor fucking ruined me!” Trump allegedly yelled, before tearing out Ivana’s hair “by the handful, as if he is trying to make her feel the same kind of pain he is feeling.… He rips off her clothes and unzips his pants. Then he jams his penis inside of her for the first time in more than sixteen months. Ivana is terrified. This is not lovemaking. This is not romantic sex. It is a violent assault. She later describes what The Donald is doing to her in no uncertain terms. According to the versions she repeats to some of her closest confidantes, ‘He raped me.’”

3. In 1997, Amy Dorris was attending the US Open in New York when Trump groped her body and forced his tongue into her mouth outside of a bathroom.

Dorris says she watched the matches from Trump’s private box with her then-boyfriend, Jason Binn, who was close with the real estate mogul. At one point during the event, she went to the bathroom that was located in the box, but behind a wall—and said Trump was waiting outside the bathroom when she walked out.

“He just shoved his tongue down my throat and I was pushing him off. And then that’s when his grip became tighter and his hands were very gropey and all over my butt, my breasts, my back, everything,” she told the Guardian.

“It felt like an octopus was hugging onto me. You just picture those suction cups on octopus. They’re stuck on you, and you’re trapped. That’s how I felt. I felt trapped,” she added.

Trump was married to Marla Maples at the time of the alleged incident. Dorris was twenty.

4. In a 1997 lawsuit, Jill Harth stated in court documents that Trump harassed and groped her in 1993. She later dropped the suit but still stood by her story.

5. Temple Taggart, former Miss Utah in the 1997 Miss USA pageant, claimed Donald Trump sexually harassed her, kissing her on the lips multiple times without consent. 

6. Mariah Billado, a former Miss Teen USA contestant, claimed that Donald Trump behaved inappropriately during the pageant. Billado said that, in 1997, Trump walked into the changing room when contestants were not fully clothed. She is one of four former Miss Teen USA contestants to tell the same story of Trump’s sexual misconduct.

7. Cathy Heller accused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct. Heller said she was having Mother’s Day brunch in 1997 at Mar-a-Lago when Trump grabbed her, tried kissing her, and became angry when she twisted away. He did this in front of Heller’s family.

8. Karena Virginia described how she’d seen Trump with a group of men at the US Open in 1998 and overheard him say about her, “Hey look at this one!” and “Look at those legs.” After his comments, Trump approached Virginia, grabbed her by the right arm, and touched her breast. The incident lingered with Virginia for years, and she came forward with her story alongside Gloria Allred: “I now understand that I was not to blame. Mr. Trump, perhaps you do not remember me or what you did to me so many years ago. But I can assure you that I remember you and what you did to me as though it was yesterday,” she said. “Your random moment of sexual pleasure came at my expense and affected me greatly.”

9. Bridget Sullivan, who was crowned Miss New Hampshire 2000, spoke publicly during the 2020 presidential campaign about how Trump came into the Miss Universe changing room while the contestants were naked. “The time that he walked through the dressing rooms was really shocking. We were all naked,” she said.

10. Tasha Dixon, a former Miss Universe contestant, accused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct. Dixon asserted that he walked into the contestants’ dressing room in 2001 while they were changing. 

11. Mindy McGillivray told the Palm Beach Post that Trump grabbed her rear end while she was working as a photographer’s assistant at a 2003 event at Mar-a-Lago. The photographer, Ken Davidoff, told the paper he vividly remembers McGillivray immediately pulling him aside to say, “Donald just grabbed my a--.”

12. On the Howard Stern Show in 2005, Trump talked about his strategies at pageants: “I’ll go backstage before a show and everyone’s getting dressed and ready and everything else. 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… 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.”

13. In the 2005 Access Hollywood tape, Donald Trump bragged to host Billy Bush about grabbing women by their genitals without consent. In the video, Trump said, “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything… Grab ’em by the pussy.” 

14. Rachel Crooks said that when she first met Trump in 2005 while working as a receptionist for a company in Trump Tower, he would not let go of her hand and inappropriately kissed her.

15. Jennifer Murphy, a former contestant on Donald Trump’s television show, The Apprentice, said that he kissed her without consent after a job interview in 2005. She also claimed that he made multiple inappropriate comments to her while she was on the show.

16. Natasha Stoynoff, a journalist, accused Donald Trump of sexually harassing her in 2005. Stoynoff said that Trump insisted on giving her a tour of his Palm Beach estate while she was interviewing him and his wife, Melania. During the tour, while Melania was in another room, he pinned her to a wall and kissed her. Trump called Stoynoff a “liar” and responded to her story, saying, “Look at her… I don’t think so.”

17. Adult film actress and director Stormy Daniels encountered Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in July 2006. He asked her to join him for a meal. She did not want to accept the invitation, but her publicist encouraged her to go. 

Trump’s wife, Melania Trump, was not at the tournament because she had just given birth.

Daniels and Trump had consensual sex in his hotel room. In 2016, Michael Cohen, an attorney for Trump, paid Daniels $130,000 to stay quiet about the story so it would not hurt Trump’s election chances.

In 2024, Trump was indicted on felony charges for attempting to illegally influence an election. In May, a New York jury found him guilty of all thirty-four charges. Trump is the first former president to be convicted of a felony.

18. Samantha Holvey described Donald Trump’s sexual misconduct at the 2006 Miss USA pageant, where he inspected each contestant before the event. Holvey noted, “He would step in front of each girl and look you over from head to toe like we were just meat, we were just sexual objects, that we were not people.”

19. Ninni Laaksonen, a former Miss Finland, alleged that Donald Trump had sexually harassed her, describing an incident when he groped her from behind in 2006.

20. Jessica Drake said she met Trump at a 2006 golf tournament in Lake Tahoe and walked the course with him during the competition. She then was invited up to his hotel suite and brought two other women with her because, she said, “I didn’t feel right going alone.” 

“When we entered the room, he grabbed each of us tightly in a hug and kissed each one of us without asking permission,” Drake said. She went on to say that after she and the other women left, she received a call from Trump asking her to come back and have dinner with him. “Donald then asked me, ‘What do you want? How much?’” 

21. Summer Zervos, a former contestant on The Apprentice, accused Donald Trump of sexual assault. Zervos claimed that Trump assaulted her on several occasions in 2007, kissing and grabbing her, and during one business meeting, “began thrusting his genitals.”

22. Cassandra Searles, Miss Washington 2013, accused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct at the Miss USA pageant. Searles posted a photo of the contestants with Trump on Facebook, saying, “One guy treated us like cattle… and proceeded to have us lined up so he could get a closer look at his property.”