Donald Trump Once Again Attacks the Women Who Have Accused Him of Sexual Violence

In a Friday “press conference” where he took no questions from the media, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said that he couldn’t have possibly sexually assaulted Jessica Leeds over four decades ago because “she would not have been the chosen one.”

In 2016, Leeds told the New York Times that Trump grabbed her breasts and stuck his hand up her skirt while they were seated next to each other on a flight in the 1970s.

On Friday, Trump went on a winding diatribe against Leeds, claiming that her allegations were unfounded and she was motivated by politics. Trump repeated several times that he was famous back then before he took a brief pause, appearing to weigh his next words.

“Frankly, I know you’re going to say it’s a terrible thing to say,” Trump began. “But, it couldn’t have happened, it didn’t happen, and she would not have been the chosen one. She would not have been the chosen one,” he continued. Eight years ago, after Leeds came forward, Trump also attacked her appearance, saying, “Believe me, she would not be my first choice.”

Trump was addressing a crowd at Trump Tower in New York City following arguments in his latest legal case involving writer E. Jean Carroll—who has testified that Trump raped her in a department store dressing room in 1996 and defamed her since by denying the accusations. Courts have sided with Carroll several times in the past couple of years, ruling that the former president must pay his accuser almost 90 million dollars.

Ahead of Friday’s trial, Carroll posted on X, “I AM READY!!!!”

This time around, Trump’s legal team is appealing one of the rulings, from last year, which found him liable of the sexual abuse and defamation of Carroll. (The court didn’t say Trump raped Carroll because at the time New York law required vaginal penetration by a penis, not fingers, for a rape conviction—that law has since changed.)

During the original trial that Trump is appealing, Leeds and another accuser, Natasha Stoynoff—who says Trump pushed her up against a wall and forcibly kissed her at his Mar-a-Lago property when she was on assignment for People magazine in December 2005—testified against the former president, hoping to establish a pattern of behavior.

Trump’s lawyers were trying to convince the federal appeals court that he deserves a new trial, with attorney John Sauer arguing that it was a “quintessential he-said-she-said case” and was motivated by politics. The court is unlikely to release a verdict before the November election.

On the same day that his team was appealing in the Carroll case in New York, Trump got news about one of his other ongoing legal battles. Judge Juan Merchan, who oversaw Trump’s criminal case in Manhattan—the one where he was convicted of 34 felony charges for covering up hush money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels during his 2016 bid for office—announced that Trump’s sentencing date would be postponed until November 26, after the presidential election.

This latest case surrounding the former president’s alleged sexual misconduct comes as voting day creeps closer and closer—an election that is poised to produce the largest gender divide in history, according to some polling and expert analysis.

A CBS News/YouGov survey from August found that much of the divide among voters this year has to do with gender. Women were more likely to see Vice President Kamala Harris as someone who “fights for people like you,” while only 29% of men said that she would fight “a lot” for people like them. Over 40% of men said they believed Donald Trump would go to bat for them.

Men and Republicans, according to the poll, were far more likely to say efforts to promote gender equality between men and women have gone too far, with only 10% of Republicans answering that efforts are not going far enough.

Trump’s apparent attempts to lure more female voters to his side have been messy. The former president has long bragged about appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, but in this election cycle, he’s been morphing his abortion rhetoric to try to appeal to the hoards of voters who oppose broad restrictions on reproductive freedom. When asked recently about how his administration would address the child care crisis in this country, Trump gave a nonsensical response that failed to outline a policy position. When critiquing his competitor, he’s often opted for misogynistic language, reportedly calling Harris a “bitch” multiple times in private and saying that he is “better looking” than the Democratic nominee at one of his rallies.

Back in 2023, Trump didn’t testify at the original trial that he’s trying to throw out.

In lieu of his own words on the stand, the prosecution admitted his past comments into the record. Namely, they pulled from the now-infamous Access Hollywood recording from 2005 to get a sense of how Trump had discussed consent in the past.

In that audio, Trump said he could grab women “by the pussy” and “do anything” to them because he was a “star.”

“He had every opportunity to take the stand and rebut all this evidence. He did not,” Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan said on Friday. “He did not put on a single witness in the civil case. We put on 11. But what we did put in is the video tape of Access Hollywood where he basically says, ‘I grab women by the pussy without their consent,’ and then in his deposition that I took and asked him about that video—what did he say? He embraced it your honor.”