As Donald Trump reels from the fallout of his sexually aggressive comments caught on tape, two women alleged that the GOP presidential nominee accosted them in a new report published Wednesday.
Jessica Leeds, 74, told The New York Times that Trump grabbed her breasts and tried to slip his hand up her skirt in the first-class cabin of a plane more than three decades ago.
"He was like an octopus," Leeds told the paper. "His hands were everywhere."
Rachel Crooks told The Times that Trump kissed her on the mouth when she introduced herself to him in front of an elevator when she worked in Trump Tower in 2005 as a 22-year-old secretary.
The Trump campaign denied the allegations, and accused the newspaper of trying to sink his candidacy.
"This entire article is fiction, and for the New York Times to launch a completely false, coordinated character assassination against Mr. Trump on a topic like this is dangerous," said Trump spokesman Jason Miller in a statement. "To reach back decades in an attempt to smear Mr. Trump trivializes sexual assault, and it sets a new low for where the media is willing to go in its efforts to determine this election."
The Times article said the newspaper's reporters verified the stories with friends and relatives of the women who told the paper they heard the allegations previously.
The thrice-married Trump has a long history of making controversial remarks about women, their appearance, their weight and his attraction to them.
But the issue came into heightened focus with the emergence of a 2005 "Access Hollywood" video Friday that shows Trump claiming he could kiss women and grab their genitals without their consent because he is a celebrity. He used vulgar language to describe women's anatomy and recalled his efforts to sleep with a married woman.
The political fall-out was immediate. Dozens of Republican elected officials and others who stood by Trump when he made controversial comments about women's appearances, Mexican immigrants, Muslims, the disabled and prisoners of war said they could no longer support him.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, the nation's highest-ranking Republican, did not revoke his endorsement but said on Monday he would no longer defend his party's standard-bearer and would spend the rest of the election focused on down-ballot races.
The "Access Hollywood" video, reported by The Washington Post, also led to a scurry among the news media for additional recordings of the GOP nominee, notably the unaired footage from his years of hosting "The Apprentice."
Several new reports have emerged since Friday, notably a CNN report on Sunday about Trump's appearances on Howard Stern's radio show.
The GOP nominee says "yeah" when the radio host asks if he can call Trump's oldest daughter "a piece of ass," says he has taken part in threesomes and describes going backstage at his beauty pageants to look at naked women.
