Another woman in sexual harassment claim against Donald Trump

A 10th woman accused Donald Trump of unwanted sexual contact on Thursday morning, just hours after the presidential candidate angrily renewed his denials of ever having inappropriate contact with women.

Karena Virginia claims that Trump groped her breast and made sexual comments toward her at a random encounter outside the 1998 US Open tennis tournament in Flushing, Queens. Virginia was 27 at the time. The two had never previously met, she said.

"I was waiting for a car to arrive to take me home," she said, flanked by famous women's rights attorney Gloria Allred, and facing a battery of clacking cameras.

As she was waiting, she claimed, Trump approached her with a small group of other men. “I was surprised when I overheard him talking to the other men about me. He said: ‘Hey, look at this one, we haven’t seen her before. Look at those legs,’ as though I were an object rather than a person.

“He then walked up to me and reached out his right arm and grabbed my right arm,” she continued. “Then his hand touched the right side of my breast. I was in shock. I flinched. ‘Don’t you know who I am? Don’t you know who I am?’ – that’s what he said to me. I felt intimidated and I felt powerless. When my car pulled up and I got in, after I closed the door, my shock turned to shame.”

Virginia, who described herself on Thursday as a yoga instructor and life coach from the tri-state area of New York, spoke in a midtown Manhattan hotel conference room just blocks away from Trump Tower. It was less than one week after Allred held a press conference with another Trump accuser.

“Her allegations demonstrate how Mr Trump selects his victims at random,” Allred said.

Asked if Allred and Virginia could produce eyewitnesses of the event, Allred replied that Virginia had told her husband and several friends about the alleged encounter soon after it occurred.

Groping and kissing

Virginia is the 10th woman to publicly accuse Trump of inappropriate sexual contact – the seventh since a 2005 tape revealed Trump bragging that his fame allowed him to grope and kiss women without their consent. In the second presidential debate, just days after the tape was published by the Washington Post, Trump denied that he ever acted on his words. He dismissed it as "locker-room talk". Several of his accusers said his denials are what spurred them to go public.

The tape and the accusers have roiled the presidential election in its critical final weeks. And it has sent some members of Trump’s party scrambling to create distance from the candidate.

Trump, meanwhile, has vehemently denied the accusations. At a recent rally, he suggested the women accusing him were not attractive enough to draw his attention. "Look at her," Trump said, referring to a People magazine reporter who claimed Trump had pushed her against a wall and kissed her. "I don't think so."

On Wednesday night, in the final presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump suggested that the rush of accusations was either orchestrated by the Clinton campaign or the product of women seeking “10 minutes of fame”. He had previously called his accusers “horrible, horrible liars”.

“Those stories are all totally false, I have to say that,” Trump said. “And I didn’t even apologise to my wife who is sitting right here because I didn’t do anything . . . Nobody has more respect for women than me.”

Virginia on Thursday said she was motived to make her claims in public out of support for the other women whom Trump had called liars.

“I have lost sleep over this,” said Virginia, holding down a sob. “I have been fearful about bringing unwanted attention to me and my loving family, which includes my husband, my daughter and my son. But in the end, I feel that it is my duty as a woman, a mother, a human being and an American citizen to speak out and tell the truth about what happened to me.

“Mr Trump,” she continued, “your random moment of sexual pleasure came at my expense and affected me greatly.”

Virginia described feeling shame about the alleged encounter and blaming herself for wearing a short dress and heels – an outfit she avoided for years afterwards “so as not to attract unwanted attention”.

‘Lecherous’

Virginia claimed that she met Trump one more time, about five years ago, at a business event. “He looked me up and down a few times in a lecherous manner. This time, mixed in with the feelings of shame, I felt disgust toward him. I had come to the realisation that I was the victim and he had violated me.”

“She has shown tremendous courage in coming forward today, especially in light of Mr Trump’s statements last night in which he called the allegations of the nine women who alleged inappropriate sexual conduct by him ‘lies and fiction’,” Allred said.

“Mr Trump, you may have thought that you could violate women without consequences. But there are always consequences. There are consequences for the women that you have hurt and there are consequences for you as well.”

Besides Virginia, nine other women have accused Trump, publicly and using their full names, of harassing them or touching them without their consent. A few, such as Jill Harth, who claimed in a 1997 lawsuit Trump tried to sexually assault her, made their claims long before the Washington Post published the infamous tape.

Others came forward just days after the revelation of the tape and Trump's subsequent denials. Jessica Leeds claimed in a New York Times article that Trump groped her on a plane while the two were seated next to each other. In the same article, Rachel Crooks, who worked in Trump Tower as a secretary, alleged that Trump would not let go of her hand after she introduced herself, and began kissing her. The two were in an elevator, she claimed.

Virginia is the second woman to tell her story with the assistance of Allred. Last week, Allred held a similar press conference with Summer Zervos, a former contestant on The Apprentice, who claimed that Trump used a meeting about a job opportunity as a pretense to grope her and make sexual advances. Neither woman has announced plans to take legal action against Trump.

On Thursday, Allred disclosed, not for the first time, that she is an avowed supporter of Clinton and served as an elected delegate at this summer’s Democratic national convention. Allred denied that she had had contact with anyone inside the Clinton campaign regarding Virginia’s claims.

The Trump campaign has not yet responded to a request for comment.

– Guardian Service