This is what rape culture looks like – in the words of Donald Trump ( Republished with permission of the Gaurdian UK) f

This is what rape culture looks like – in the words of Donald Trump

Look up objectification and victim blaming, and the Republican presidential nominee is a textbook case of offensive attitudes toward women
Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event earlier this year as in daughter, Ivanka, and his wife, Melania, continue to support the foul-mouthed Republican nominee. Photograph: Carlo Allegri/Reuters

Why are we all so shocked by the sexual assault allegations againstDonald Trump? It has always been clear that his attitudes toward women are dangerously retrograde; he’s never tried to hide who he is. Quite the opposite in fact; he’s built a successful brand out of being an offensive playboy who’s allowed to get away with it. In short, he’s built his entire career on the foundation of what feminist academics call “rape culture”.

If you’re confused by the term, “rape culture” describes the normalization of sexual violence in society – and it’s this very normalization that makes it a difficult thing to explain. Rape culture doesn’t so much actively encourage rape as passively condone it. You can’t pin it down to one particular thing; rather it’s the accumulation of a number of social norms that perpetuate the idea that women are sexual objects, and that sexual objectification is simply a fact of life.

Trump is a one-man textbook of such norms. So let’s use him as such. I’ve broken down the various assumptions, stock phrases, and social expectations that, together, constitute rape culture. Trump has helpfully provided examples of each.
Women are sexual objects, to be judged as such


'I'm a gentleman': Trump menaces Clinton with imposing presence and brash insults

“Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president? I mean, she’s a woman, and I’m not s’posed ta say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?” – Trump describing his then Republican primary rival Carly Fiorina in Rolling Stone, 2015

“A person who is flat-chested is very hard to be a 10.” – The Howard Stern Show, 2005

“If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?” – Donald Trump retweeted this in 2015, later deleted

“I’d pay a lot of money [for Rosie O’ Donnell not to give me oral sex]. That’s one of the most unattractive people. She took great offense at the fact I said she better be careful or I, or one of one friends would go and pick up her wife.” – The Howard Stern Show, 2007

Young girls are sex objects in training
“I am going to be dating her [a young girl] in 10 years.” – In a 1992 video in which a 46-year-old Trump ogles a group of young girls and jokes about how he’d be “dating” one of them in 10 years.

“I’ve known Paris Hilton from the time she’s 12. Her parents are friends of mine, and, you know, the first time I saw her, she walked into the room and I said, ‘Who the hell is that?’ … Well, at 12, I wasn’t interested... They’re sort of always stuck around that 25 category.” He then went on to admit he’d watched her sex tape.” – The Howard Stern Show, 2003

Even Trump’s daughter isn’t exempted from objectification
“[Ivanka]’s got the best body.” – The Howard Stern Show, 2003

“If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her” – The View, 2006
Objectification is actually an honour. No woman wants to be ‘unfuckable’

“Look at her…I don’t think so.” – Trump’s response to People magazine journalist Natasha Stoynoff’s claims that he sexually assaulted her during an interview.
Women are manipulative and use their bodies to control men

“I have seen women manipulate men with just a twitch of their eye – or perhaps another body part.” – Trump: The Art of the Comeback, 1997





Here is Donald Trump's response to suggestions he is a "sexual predator"

Women can’t control their desires so men have to do it for them

“All of the women on ‘The Apprentice’ flirted with me – consciously or unconsciously. That’s to be expected.” – How To Get Rich, 2004
If you’ve got enough money or fame, women will let you do anything to them

“When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything …Grab them by the pussy … You can do anything.” – off-camera remarks on Access Hollywood, 2005

“Women find his power almost as much of a turn-on as his money.” – Donald Trump describing himself, as quoted in The Narcissist Next Door by Jeffrey Kluger

Women want to be degraded

“Women, you have to treat ‘em like shit.” – New York magazine, 9 November 1992
Women use their looks as currency, as a way to get ahead.

“You wouldn’t have your job if you weren’t beautiful.” – Interview with a female reporter at a Miss Universe event in Las Vegas, 2014

“It’s certainly not groundbreaking news that the early victories by the women on ‘The Apprentice’ were, to a very large extent, dependent on their sex appeal.” – How To Get Rich, 2004

“It must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees” ; Trump to actor Brande Roderick when she asked Trump if she could be the next project manager on – Celebrity Apprentice: All Stars, 2013

“Some of the women that are complaining, I know how much [Roger Ailes] helped them…” – Trump to NBC, as sexual assault allegations against former Fox head Roger Ailes started piling up in July 2016

 In a video @realDonaldTrump on @HowardStern, Trump jokingly refers to women he's slept w/ as "victims".https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwJXyKKKyW0 …

Women who like sex are sluts

“Did Crooked Hillary help disgusting (check out sex tape and past) Alicia M become a US citizen so she could use her in the debate?” – Twitter, September 2016
It’s just biology; men can’t help themselves from assaulting women.

“26,000 unreported sexual assults [sic] in the military-only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?” – Twitter, May2013
Men decide when women can take offense

When asked about his treatment of women and the Access Hollywood audio during the second presidential debate he offered up the following excuses:

“This was locker room talk.”

“What [Bill Clinton] did was far worse … and Hillary Clinton attacked those women.”

“It’s just words, folks. It’s just words.”

“If you look at Bill Clinton, far worse. Mine were words and his was action.”

“It is things that people say.”

“When Hillary brings up a point like that and she talks about words that I said 11 years ago, I think it’s disgraceful, and I think she should be ashamed of herself.” (This was followed by applause)

Victim blaming

At a rally in Florida on 13 October, Trump told his supporters that the allegations women had made about him weren’t true. Describing them as: “False smears.” “Horror show of lies, deceptions and malicious attacks.”

“Why wasn’t it part of the story that appeared 20, or 12 years ago?”

“They will seek to destroy everything about you, including your reputation. They will lie, lie, lie, and they will do worse than that.”

Rape culture begets rape culture

The most pernicious thing about rape culture is that it’s self-perpetuating. Women are afraid to come forward about sexual assault because they’re worried they won’t be believed. When they do have the courage to come forward they often aren’t believed. Their characters are ripped apart; their motives are questioned; they’re told they were probably ‘asking for it.’ And so other women decide they may as well just keep quiet. If we are to learn anything from Trump’s masterclass in rape culture it’s that none of us should keep quiet.

Donald Trump, Groper in Chief ( Republished with permission of the Author Nicholas Kristof and the New York Times)

Donald Trump, Groper in Chief ( Republished with per mission of the Author Nicholas Kristof and the New York Times). This article underwent numerous and extensive fact checking and also  senior and multiple legal opinion by the NY Times before it was published . More women who have been subject to similar and worse treatment by Donald Trump have now come forward .The NY Times is seeking legal opinion on  over two dozen women who signed  non disclosure agreements that  prevents them from coming forward with tales  revealing heinous sexual predator incidents and date rape by Donald Trump. 

Jill Harth’s first concern with Donald Trump’s hands wasn’t that they were small. It’s that they were everywhere.

Harth and her longtime boyfriend were in meetings with Trump to forge a business partnership. “He was relentless,” Harth recalled in an interview, describing how on Dec. 12, 1992, he took the couple to dinner and a club — and then situated himself beside Harth and ran his hands up her skirt, to her crotch. “I didn’t know how to handle it. I would go away from him and say I have to go to the restroom. It was the escape route.”

We’ve all heard of Trump’s unethical or loutish behavior, most recently in a 2005 recording unearthed by The Washington Post on Friday in which he boasts of kissing and groping women. The story that Harth and the boyfriend, George Houraney, tell of their interactions with Trump over six years — including business cheating and attempted rape — shows how that predation worked in practice. “He name-dropped continuously,” Harth said under oath in a deposition in a subsequent lawsuit, “when he wasn’t groping me.”

Harth and Houraney were simply an ordinary Florida couple thrilled that Trump wanted to partner with them. And that’s when the nightmare began. (Trump strongly denies these improprieties.) Anyone thinking about voting for Trump would do well to listen to Houraney and Harth.Continue reading the main story


They were operating a small Florida company called American Dream Enterprise that ran a “calendar girl” beauty contest, an automobile show, a music competition and other events. They had been together for 13 years and were negotiating with Trump to hold the events in his Atlantic City casinos as a way to bring all of them more revenue.

Trump dazzled them with his bold and confident vision of turning their events into huge moneymakers. So, Harth says, she was in a bind familiar to many women: She didn’t want to risk offending a potential partner and benefactor, but neither did she want to be pawed.

The first sign of trouble came the day before the evening groping, in an initial business meeting in which, Harth and Houraney say, Trump spent the time asking about the breasts of the beauty contestants — real or enhanced? — and staring at Harth, then 30. At one point he asked Houraney, “Are you sleeping with her?” Houraney explained awkwardly that they were a couple, but Trump was unfazed.

“You know, there’s going to be a problem,” Trump told Houraney, according to a 1997 sexual harassment lawsuit Harth filed against him. “I’m very attracted to your girlfriend.”

On Jan. 24, 1993, Harth and Houraney went to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida for a contract-signing celebration, bringing along some “calendar girls” at Trump’s request. He offered Harth a tour of the estate and then pulled her into the empty bedroom of his daughter Ivanka.

“I was admiring the decoration, and next thing I know he’s pushing me against a wall and has his hands all over me,” Harth told me. “He was trying to kiss me. I was freaking out.” Harth says she was desperately protesting, and finally managed to run out of the room and find the group again. She and Houraney left rather than stay the night, as they had intended.

Some of the calendar girls stayed, and the sexual harassment lawsuit says Trump showed up uninvited in the predawn hours in the bedroom of one of the young women; she kicked him out but was shaken. When contacted, the woman declined to speak about the experience, and I’m not naming her here.

Trump was then with Marla Maples, who was pregnant that spring with his daughter Tiffany, but this didn’t constrain him. He took an intense interest in the calendar girls, pursuing some and rejecting others, Harth says, adding that he had an aversion to black contestants and made derogatory comments about them.

That year, Harth continued to meet Trump for business — and, she says, he continued to try to jump her. “He’d say, ‘Let’s go in my room, I want to lie down,’ and he’d pull me along. I’d say, ‘I don’t want to lie down,’ and it would turn into a wrestling match. … I remember yelling, ‘I didn’t come here for this.’ He’d say, ‘Just calm down.’”

Harth says that she worried about being raped by a man who weighed twice as much as she did, and at one point she vomited as a defense mechanism. But she says that he was never violent and genuinely seemed to assume sexual interest on her part; often he was playful as she was frightened: “His mind was in a totally different place than mine,” Harth recalls. “He thinks he’s God’s gift to women.”

Harth said in her deposition that all this was “very traumatic,” but she remained cordial because she feared that showing anger would destroy the business relationship and her ambitions of getting ahead. For the same reason, she told me, she did not go to the police to report sexual assault.

This was also a different time, when it was perhaps more accepted for powerful men to prey on young women, when women felt less able to protest. In fairness to Trump, other senior men in politics and business — John Kennedy and Bill Clinton come to mind — also sometimes showed a sense of entitlement toward young women.

In the end, Houraney and Harth used a Trump casino to hold an event that Trump praised in a letter to them. But in 1994, Trump walked away from the relationship and refused to pay what he owed, they say.

Houraney, who owned the events planning company, sued Trump for breach of contract, and the two sides eventually reached a confidential settlement. Harth says Trump paid somewhat more than $100,000. Harth separately had filed her sexual harassment suit, which also alleged attempted rape; she withdrew her suit as a condition for settling the contract dispute, she says.

After the settlement, Houraney and Harth say, Trump reached out to them, inviting them to a party and coming across as so charming that they wondered if he had been transformed. Not long after this, Houraney and Harth, who had married in 1995, had a bitter falling out and divorce.

Houraney and Harth haven’t spoken in years, but they offered almost identical accounts when I interviewed them separately, and their stories match Harth’s deposition and her sexual harassment lawsuit from the time.

During the divorce proceedings, Harth fell into a deep depression, compounded by the death of her brother and the loss of her job at Houraney’s company. At this point Trump began calling her, consoling her on the divorce and offering her a plane ticket to visit him in New York. She was wary but also flattered and practical enough to wonder if he might help her find employment. So in 1998 she began dating him.

I asked her: Why would a woman who accused Trump of attempted rape ever go out with him?

“I was scared, thinking, ‘what am I going to do now?’” she says. “When he called me and tried to work on me again, I was thinking maybe I should give this a try, maybe if he’s still working on me, I should give this rich guy a chance.”

They dated for several months in 1998, when he was separated from Maples, she says. In the end, he was a disappointing boyfriend, always watching television and rarely offering emotional support, she says.

“It was a hard divorce, and I was in a nonstop crying jag,” she recalls. “You know what he was thinking? He wanted me to get a boob job. He made an appointment for me to get a boob job, a doctor in Miami.”

Have you, as a woman, faced treatment like Donald Trump describes? Have you, as a man, talked the way Donald Trump did, or listened to men talking that way? Replies may be referenced in a follow-up post.

Harth says that she left him, finally fed up, and that soon afterward he took up with Melania, his current wife.

Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, responded after this article was published online: “Mr. Trump denies each and every statement made by Ms. Harth.” Indeed, Trump has long offered a version of events that is very different.

In 1996, after Harth alleged sexual harassment, The National Enquirer quoted Trump as having told a close friend: “The truth is that Jill Harth is obsessed with me — and would do everything she could to get into my pants.”

In April of this year, Trump told The Boston Globe that Harth and Houraney had alleged sexual harassment only because their breach-of-contract lawsuit was going nowhere, and he denied as “total nonsense” the idea that he had slipped into the bed of the young woman at Mar-a-Lago. Trump also denied that he had rejected black contestants.

The Trump campaign also released emails from last fall and winter in which Harth, who is now a makeup artist in New York, sends warm wishes and pleads for jobs doing his hair and makeup. “I am definitely Team Trump,” she emailed the campaign a year ago, and at a Trump event in January she was ushered backstage to see him.

I asked her: If he traumatized and cheated you, why email his aides and meet him?

“I thought I was making nice, maybe they’d call me for makeup, maybe I could get some kind of work out of the dude,” Harth told me. “But it was not well thought out. It came back to bite me, and I look like a fool.”

Talking to Harth and Houraney, and reviewing the lawsuits and depositions from the time, convinced me that they’re telling the truth. It helps that many others have testified about Trump behavior that matches elements of the story — the stiffing of business partners, the sexual predation — and that he himself has promoted his own boorishness.

“He’s all about him,” Harth says, summing up what she learned about the man who may be our next president. “He’s a con artist.”

This column has been updated with a response from the Trump campaign.

Donald Trump, Groper in Chief ( Republished with permission of the Author Nicholas Kristof and the New York Times)

Donald Trump, Groper in Chief ( Republished with per mission of the Author Nicholas Kristof and the New York Times). This article underwent numerous and extensive fact checking and also  senior and multiple legal opinion by the NY Times before it was published . More women who have been subject to similar and worse treatment by Donald Trump have now come forward .The NY Times is seeking legal opinion on  over two dozen women who signed  non disclosure agreements that  prevents them from coming forward with tales  revealing heinous sexual predator incidents and date rape by Donald Trump. 

Jill Harth’s first concern with Donald Trump’s hands wasn’t that they were small. It’s that they were everywhere.

Harth and her longtime boyfriend were in meetings with Trump to forge a business partnership. “He was relentless,” Harth recalled in an interview, describing how on Dec. 12, 1992, he took the couple to dinner and a club — and then situated himself beside Harth and ran his hands up her skirt, to her crotch. “I didn’t know how to handle it. I would go away from him and say I have to go to the restroom. It was the escape route.”

We’ve all heard of Trump’s unethical or loutish behavior, most recently in a 2005 recording unearthed by The Washington Post on Friday in which he boasts of kissing and groping women. The story that Harth and the boyfriend, George Houraney, tell of their interactions with Trump over six years — including business cheating and attempted rape — shows how that predation worked in practice. “He name-dropped continuously,” Harth said under oath in a deposition in a subsequent lawsuit, “when he wasn’t groping me.”

Harth and Houraney were simply an ordinary Florida couple thrilled that Trump wanted to partner with them. And that’s when the nightmare began. (Trump strongly denies these improprieties.) Anyone thinking about voting for Trump would do well to listen to Houraney and Harth.Continue reading the main story


They were operating a small Florida company called American Dream Enterprise that ran a “calendar girl” beauty contest, an automobile show, a music competition and other events. They had been together for 13 years and were negotiating with Trump to hold the events in his Atlantic City casinos as a way to bring all of them more revenue.

Trump dazzled them with his bold and confident vision of turning their events into huge moneymakers. So, Harth says, she was in a bind familiar to many women: She didn’t want to risk offending a potential partner and benefactor, but neither did she want to be pawed.

The first sign of trouble came the day before the evening groping, in an initial business meeting in which, Harth and Houraney say, Trump spent the time asking about the breasts of the beauty contestants — real or enhanced? — and staring at Harth, then 30. At one point he asked Houraney, “Are you sleeping with her?” Houraney explained awkwardly that they were a couple, but Trump was unfazed.

“You know, there’s going to be a problem,” Trump told Houraney, according to a 1997 sexual harassment lawsuit Harth filed against him. “I’m very attracted to your girlfriend.”

On Jan. 24, 1993, Harth and Houraney went to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida for a contract-signing celebration, bringing along some “calendar girls” at Trump’s request. He offered Harth a tour of the estate and then pulled her into the empty bedroom of his daughter Ivanka.

“I was admiring the decoration, and next thing I know he’s pushing me against a wall and has his hands all over me,” Harth told me. “He was trying to kiss me. I was freaking out.” Harth says she was desperately protesting, and finally managed to run out of the room and find the group again. She and Houraney left rather than stay the night, as they had intended.

Some of the calendar girls stayed, and the sexual harassment lawsuit says Trump showed up uninvited in the predawn hours in the bedroom of one of the young women; she kicked him out but was shaken. When contacted, the woman declined to speak about the experience, and I’m not naming her here.

Trump was then with Marla Maples, who was pregnant that spring with his daughter Tiffany, but this didn’t constrain him. He took an intense interest in the calendar girls, pursuing some and rejecting others, Harth says, adding that he had an aversion to black contestants and made derogatory comments about them.

That year, Harth continued to meet Trump for business — and, she says, he continued to try to jump her. “He’d say, ‘Let’s go in my room, I want to lie down,’ and he’d pull me along. I’d say, ‘I don’t want to lie down,’ and it would turn into a wrestling match. … I remember yelling, ‘I didn’t come here for this.’ He’d say, ‘Just calm down.’”

Harth says that she worried about being raped by a man who weighed twice as much as she did, and at one point she vomited as a defense mechanism. But she says that he was never violent and genuinely seemed to assume sexual interest on her part; often he was playful as she was frightened: “His mind was in a totally different place than mine,” Harth recalls. “He thinks he’s God’s gift to women.”

Harth said in her deposition that all this was “very traumatic,” but she remained cordial because she feared that showing anger would destroy the business relationship and her ambitions of getting ahead. For the same reason, she told me, she did not go to the police to report sexual assault.

This was also a different time, when it was perhaps more accepted for powerful men to prey on young women, when women felt less able to protest. In fairness to Trump, other senior men in politics and business — John Kennedy and Bill Clinton come to mind — also sometimes showed a sense of entitlement toward young women.

In the end, Houraney and Harth used a Trump casino to hold an event that Trump praised in a letter to them. But in 1994, Trump walked away from the relationship and refused to pay what he owed, they say.

Houraney, who owned the events planning company, sued Trump for breach of contract, and the two sides eventually reached a confidential settlement. Harth says Trump paid somewhat more than $100,000. Harth separately had filed her sexual harassment suit, which also alleged attempted rape; she withdrew her suit as a condition for settling the contract dispute, she says.

After the settlement, Houraney and Harth say, Trump reached out to them, inviting them to a party and coming across as so charming that they wondered if he had been transformed. Not long after this, Houraney and Harth, who had married in 1995, had a bitter falling out and divorce.

Houraney and Harth haven’t spoken in years, but they offered almost identical accounts when I interviewed them separately, and their stories match Harth’s deposition and her sexual harassment lawsuit from the time.

During the divorce proceedings, Harth fell into a deep depression, compounded by the death of her brother and the loss of her job at Houraney’s company. At this point Trump began calling her, consoling her on the divorce and offering her a plane ticket to visit him in New York. She was wary but also flattered and practical enough to wonder if he might help her find employment. So in 1998 she began dating him.

I asked her: Why would a woman who accused Trump of attempted rape ever go out with him?

“I was scared, thinking, ‘what am I going to do now?’” she says. “When he called me and tried to work on me again, I was thinking maybe I should give this a try, maybe if he’s still working on me, I should give this rich guy a chance.”

They dated for several months in 1998, when he was separated from Maples, she says. In the end, he was a disappointing boyfriend, always watching television and rarely offering emotional support, she says.

“It was a hard divorce, and I was in a nonstop crying jag,” she recalls. “You know what he was thinking? He wanted me to get a boob job. He made an appointment for me to get a boob job, a doctor in Miami.”

Have you, as a woman, faced treatment like Donald Trump describes? Have you, as a man, talked the way Donald Trump did, or listened to men talking that way? Replies may be referenced in a follow-up post.

Harth says that she left him, finally fed up, and that soon afterward he took up with Melania, his current wife.

Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, responded after this article was published online: “Mr. Trump denies each and every statement made by Ms. Harth.” Indeed, Trump has long offered a version of events that is very different.

In 1996, after Harth alleged sexual harassment, The National Enquirer quoted Trump as having told a close friend: “The truth is that Jill Harth is obsessed with me — and would do everything she could to get into my pants.”

In April of this year, Trump told The Boston Globe that Harth and Houraney had alleged sexual harassment only because their breach-of-contract lawsuit was going nowhere, and he denied as “total nonsense” the idea that he had slipped into the bed of the young woman at Mar-a-Lago. Trump also denied that he had rejected black contestants.

The Trump campaign also released emails from last fall and winter in which Harth, who is now a makeup artist in New York, sends warm wishes and pleads for jobs doing his hair and makeup. “I am definitely Team Trump,” she emailed the campaign a year ago, and at a Trump event in January she was ushered backstage to see him.

I asked her: If he traumatized and cheated you, why email his aides and meet him?

“I thought I was making nice, maybe they’d call me for makeup, maybe I could get some kind of work out of the dude,” Harth told me. “But it was not well thought out. It came back to bite me, and I look like a fool.”

Talking to Harth and Houraney, and reviewing the lawsuits and depositions from the time, convinced me that they’re telling the truth. It helps that many others have testified about Trump behavior that matches elements of the story — the stiffing of business partners, the sexual predation — and that he himself has promoted his own boorishness.

“He’s all about him,” Harth says, summing up what she learned about the man who may be our next president. “He’s a con artist.”

This column has been updated with a response from the Trump campaign.