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This week, The Guardian published a pre-election bombshell alleging that Donald Trump sexually assaulted a model in 1993. This is the latest in a series of similar accusations dating back decades. Stacey Williams, now 56, claims that President Trump groped her during a visit to Trump Tower, but the encounter was with a convicted sex offender and financier she was dating. She said it was orchestrated by the late Jeffrey Epstein. Williams told the Guardian that Trump touched her breasts, lower back and buttocks. “I felt really bad about being conditioned,” she later told CNN. “I rolled into it like a piece of meat in some kind of weird, twisted game,” Williams said Monday night, also telling her story on a public “Survivors for Kamala” Zoom call. spoke. The Trump campaign denied the accusations.
With less than two weeks until the election, President Trump’s treatment of women is once again in the spotlight, but at the same time his harsh disdain for immigrants has taken on an increasingly dark and vitriolic tone. “This election cycle, former President Donald Trump has made mass deportation his biggest campaign promise,” my colleague Isabella Diaz writes. Isabella summarized President Trump’s 2016 pledge to deport 11 million illegal immigrants, reporting that this is a long-standing promise. A thorough raid on his workplace. His Muslim ban. And cruel family separation. As Isabella demonstrated, Trump’s plans for a second term will significantly escalate these policies. Trump promised “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”
These two major themes of President Trump’s treatment of women and far-right immigration policies first coalesced in the reporting I did during Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. At the time, my investigation revealed that models working for his respected company, Trump Model Management, were entering the United States on tourist visas that did not allow them to work. Former Trump models said they were encouraged to mislead federal officials and instructed to lie on customs forms. Once here, they are forced to live in cramped basement apartments, charged exorbitantly high rents and dizzying fees and charges, leaving many in debt and in legal limbo. I fell into a situation. “It’s like modern-day slavery,” one model told me. Another woman said in the lawsuit that she “felt like a slave.”
Here’s a video summarizing the media storm that ensued after publication:
Don’t forget foreigners as President Trump ramps up ‘zero tolerance’ Trump’s own company had no problem letting people come to the U.S. to work without permission: Models at his New York City office @Trump Model. A video to remind you of 2016 @motherjones Campaign released https://t.co/R5bvuhBdkF pic.twitter.com/KfVl6sFn6i
— James West (@jamewest2010) July 7, 2018
My research (8 articles over a total of 8 months) provided a powerful example of Trump’s duplicity. And Trump’s conflation of his business practices with the presidency foreshadowed his double standards. The article made an immediate impact during his campaign, albeit briefly during his scandal-plagued campaign for the White House. Models are fleeing Trump Model Management, with officials blaming the company’s rapid decline on President Trump’s controversial public persona. Trump’s once-lauded brand has been tarnished, they say.
In the end, after my reporting, Trump Models joined the list of defunct Trump ventures, along with Trump Steaks, Trump University, Trump Airlines, and Trump Magazine, but it was also a one-man professional venture. Another closed company run by a man who continues to advertise himself as a businessman. , everything can be fixed.
Read my original research here.
