AI
Saturday, October 08, 2016 8:31:34 PM
Donald Trump’s Apology That Wasn’t
By MAGGIE HABERMAN
OCT. 8, 2016
For hours on Friday night, the political world waited for the rarest of expressions from Donald J. Trump [ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/donald-trump-on-the-issues.html ] — a heartfelt apology.
What viewers got was anything but.
During a 90-second videotaped appearance [ http://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000004698416/trump-responds-to-outrage-over-lewd-remarks.html ], Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, offered a strikingly brief articulation of regret for a decade-old audiotape [ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/politics/donald-trump-women.html ] in which he boasted about grabbing women’s genitals and said he could have his way with women because of his fame.
But his real message, which appeared early Saturday, was one of defiance. He described the controversy that upended the Republican Party for most of Friday as a mere “distraction,” and said that his vulgar remarks captured on the tape were nothing compared with the way Bill and Hillary Clinton [ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/hillary-clinton-on-the-issues.html ] had mistreated women.
If anything, Mr. Trump’s videotaped statement was a truncated version of a speech that he had given countless times. And it did not reflect the several hours of conference calls and strategy meetings among his top aides, who were at first stunned and then nearly paralyzed by the revelation of the tape, which they worried would be fatal to his White House hopes.
“That took 10 hours?” an incredulous Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist, asked on CNN immediately after the statement.
With his brow furrowed and his face a tight scowl, Mr. Trump sat hunched in a chair inside Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, with the glittering nighttime New York City skyline behind him.
“I’ve never said I’m a perfect person, nor pretended to be someone that I’m not,” said Mr. Trump, a 70-year-old real estate developer and former reality television star.
Then came the apologetic part.
“I’ve said and done things I regret, and the words released today on this more-than-a-decade-old video are one of them,” Mr. Trump said of the hot-mike recording of him bragging to Billy Bush [ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/politics/billy-bush-donald-trump-video.html ], then the host of NBC’s “Access Hollywood,” about his groping and uninvited kissing of women.
“Anyone who knows me knows these words don’t reflect who I am,” Mr. Trump continued.
“I said it, I was wrong, and I apologize,” he said.
Oddly, Mr. Trump seemed to frame his comments not as sincere concern about those he may have hurt or offended, but as part of his own journey, describing his growth as a person and how humbling it has been for him to campaign across the nation and learn of other people’s worries and travails.
“I’ve traveled the country talking about change for America, but my travels have also changed me,” he said, describing meeting mothers who have lost children and people who have lost their jobs.
“I pledge to be a better man tomorrow and will never, ever let you down,” Mr. Trump said.
Grudging though they seemed, Mr. Trump’s comments were a marked departure from his lifelong resistance to any admission of fault. Mr. Trump values strength and power and disparages weakness. His usual response, when criticized or hurt, has been to counterpunch forcefully.
Before the release of the short statement, advisers to Mr. Trump had huddled with him at Trump Tower, along with his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner, to discuss how to respond to the crisis. The advisers cautioned against holding a news conference, something that had been discussed, because it could become unwieldy and spin out of his control. They realized they needed to address the issue quickly, at a minimum to try to stop the defections of Republican officials who had begun to shun and loudly denounce him.
But one adviser to Mr. Trump cautioned before the statement that if the candidate mentioned Mrs. Clinton, it would fail.
Mr. Trump did just that.
“Hillary Clinton and her kind have run our country into the ground,” Mr. Trump said. “I’ve said some foolish things, but there’s a big difference between the words and actions of other people. Bill Clinton [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/bill_clinton/index.html ] has actually abused women, and Hillary has bullied, attacked, shamed and intimidated his victims.”
Mr. Trump then turned the focus to his second debate against Mrs. Clinton, less than 48 hours away.
Ever the performer and intimidator, he added, with a hint of menace in his voice: “We will discuss this more in the coming days. See you at the debate on Sunday.”
Related Coverage
Transcript of Donald Trump’s Videotaped Apology
OCT. 8, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/donald-trump-apology-statement.html
Donald Trump Apology Caps Day of Outrage Over Lewd Tape
OCT. 7, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/politics/donald-trump-women.html [excerpted and linked at/see (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=125669719 and preceding (and any future following)]
Donald Trump’s Lewd Comments About Women
OCT. 7, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000004698018/donald-trumps-lewd-comments-about-women.html
© 2016 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/politics/donald-trump-apology.html [with embedded video]
*
Melania Trump Statement
October 08, 2016
"The words my husband used are unacceptable and offensive to me. This does not represent the man that I know. He has the heart and mind of a leader. I hope people will accept his apology, as I have, and focus on the important issues facing our nation and the world."
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/melania-trump-statement
--
Donald Trump, Groper in Chief
Donald Trump with Jill Harth in 1992.
George Houraney
Jill Harth at home in Queens. Behind her is a 1996 portrait of her by Ralph Wolfe Cowan, who has also painted Donald Trump.
Chad Batka for The New York Times
By Nicholas Kristof
OCT. 7, 2016
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 [ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/us/politics/donald-trump-women.html ], most recently in a 2005 recording [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-recorded-having-extremely-lewd-conversation-about-women-in-2005/2016/10/07/3b9ce776-8cb4-11e6-bf8a-3d26847eeed4_story.html ] 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.
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.”
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 [ https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2016/04/16/trump/P6jVWXAzaG12Ou5dPXYCDL/story.html ] 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 [ http://www.jillharth.com/ ] 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.”
Related Coverage
Watch: Nick Kristof Discusses This Column and More on Donald Trump, on Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/kristof/videos/10154405172442891/
Lewd Donald Trump Tape Is a Breaking Point for Many in the G.O.P.
OCT. 8, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/09/us/politics/donald-trump-campaign.html
Opinion Editorial
The Sleaziness of Donald Trump
OCT. 7, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/opinion/the-sleaziness-of-donald-trump.html
© 2016 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/09/opinion/sunday/donald-trump-groper-in-chief.html [with comments]
*
Jill Harth speaks out about alleged groping by Donald Trump
Donald Trump in 1992 at his Mar-a-Lago estate, where Harth says ‘he pushed me up against the wall, and had his hands all over me and tried to get up my dress’.
Photograph: Alamy
Harth said of her wish for an apology from Trump: ‘I don’t fully expect one.’
Photograph: Guardian
Harth stands by claims of incident described in 1997 lawsuit as ‘attempted rape’ and wants apology from Donald Trump: ‘Don’t call me a liar’
Lucia Graves in New York
Wednesday 20 July 2016, Updated/Republished Saturday 8 October 2016 14.15 EDT
A woman at the centre of sexual assault allegations against Donald Trump has spoken for the first time in detail about her personal experience with the billionaire tycoon who this week became the Republican nominee for president [ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/19/donald-trump-nominated-president-republican-convention ].
Jill Harth, a makeup artist, has stayed quiet for almost 20 years about the way Trump pursued her, and – according to a lawsuit [ https://www.scribd.com/doc/300193678/1997-Jill-Harth-Lawsuit ] she instigated – cornered her and groped her in his daughter’s bedroom.
After Trump mounted his campaign for the White House, details emerged of the 1997 complaint, in which Harth accused him of “attempted ‘rape’”.
She said she was quickly inundated with interview requests from major US television networks, but resolved not to speak about the events – until Trump publicly said in May that her claims were “meritless” and his daughter Ivanka gave an interview in which she said her father was “not a groper”.
Harth, who feels she has been publicly branded a liar and believes her business has suffered because of her association with the allegations, decided to speak out about her experience with Trump because she wants an apology.
In an hour-long interview at the Guardian’s New York office on Tuesday, Harth said she stands by her charges against Trump, which run from low-grade sexual harassment to an episode her lawyers described in the lawsuit as “attempted ‘rape’”.
She first met Trump in December 1992 at his offices in Trump Tower, where she and her then romantic partner, George Houraney, were making a business presentation. The couple wanted to recruit Trump to back their American Dream festival, in which Harth oversaw a pin-up competition known as American Dream Calendar Girls. Harth described that meeting as “the highlight of our career”.
But in other ways, it was something of a lowlight: Trump took an interest in Harth immediately and began subjecting her to a steady string of unwanted sexual advances, detailed by Harth in her complaint.
There was the initial leering in that first December meeting in Trump Tower, and the inappropriate questions after her relationship status. It continued the next night over dinner at the Plaza Hotel’s Oak Room, where at a dinner with beauty pageant contestants she alleges he groped her under the table.
It culminated in January 1993, when Harth and Houraney were visiting his Florida mansion, Mar-a-Lago, to finalize and then celebrate the beauty pageant deal with a party.
After business concluded, Harth and Houraney were on tour of Mar-a-Lago along with a group of young pageant contestants – Trump wanted to “see the quality of the girls he was sponsoring”, Harth recalled – when he pulled her aside into one of the children’s bedrooms.
“He pushed me up against the wall, and had his hands all over me and tried to get up my dress again,” Harth said, “and I had to physically say: ‘What are you doing? Stop it.’ It was a shocking thing to have him do this because he knew I was with George, he knew they were in the next room. And how could he be doing this when I’m there for business?”
Speaking as Republicans gathered in Cleveland to formally declare Trump as the party’s candidate in the November general election, Harth said she had been very reluctant to talk after the sexual assault allegations resurfaced, “because honestly, it was painful for me to have to do it again. It was stressful, it gave me anxiety, it definitely wounded my marriage – it wasn’t the death knell, but it wounded it, it was stressful having to handle this.”
She recalled how Trump – who had just gone through a divorce from his first wife, Ivana, and was in a relationship with Marla Maples, who would become his second wife – pursued her and urged her to leave Houraney.
“Trump did everything in his power to get me to leave him. He constantly called me and said: ‘I love you, baby, I’m going to be the best lover you ever had. What are you doing with that loser, you need to be with me, you need to step it up to the big leagues.’
“He was constantly working on me during that time and that took a toll on me. But I moved on. I’m a forgiving type person, OK? I’m a Christian, I moved on.”
‘They tried to get me to say it never happened’
Trump’s decision to run for president brought the question to the fore for her once more. And initially, she said she was inclined to let bygones be bygones.
She concedes she even found herself getting excited at the thought that someone she knew so well was running for president.
A recent Trump rally she attended seemed to confirm her decision to lie low. “‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said, ‘I’m not going to say anything bad, we’ve moved on, we’re friendly,’” Harth recalled in her interview with the Guardian.
When Trump thanked her and gave her a hug, she thought he wouldn’t say anything either.
The interaction, Harth said, reaffirmed her decision to stay quiet. That is, until she saw Trump dismiss media reports referencing her case as “meritless”, or worse.
After the New York Times ran a story [ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/us/politics/donald-trump-women.html ] in May this year about Trump’s history with women, including an account of Harth’s story, Trump’s campaign even reached out to her to pressure her to take back her account, she told the Guardian on Tuesday.
“His office – and I have it on my voicemails that he called, that they called – they asked me to recant everything when the New York Times article came out. They were trying to get me to say it never happened and I made it up. And I said I’m not doing that,” she recalled. Trump’s office denied this.
She was further upset by an interview Trump’s daughter Ivanka gave in the wake of the New York Times article saying her dad is “not a groper”.
“I understand that the girl wanted to defend her dad, being it’s her dad,” she said, “but what did she know? She was 10 years old! She was 10 years old at the time. She didn’t know what her father was about, what he was doing, how he was acting.”
Such statements felt defamatory to Harth, adding insult to injury. That’s when she hired attorney Lisa Bloom to demand that Trump retract his statements that are, as Bloom put it, “effectively calling her a liar”.
“Jill is very clear that she is not a liar,” Bloom said. “And her reputation is important to her. And her living a life free of this kind of stress is important to her. So we’re calling on not only Mr Trump, Ivanka Trump, too.”
The renewed controversy comes as Trump prepares to give his keynote speech in Cleveland on Thursday. It also comes as Roger Ailes, the chairman and CEO of Trump-friendly Fox News, is in the process of being ousted [ https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jul/19/roger-ailes-megyn-kelly-alleges-sexual-harrassment ] following a sexual harassment suit filed by a former anchor.
When Trump’s office was asked to respond to Harth’s allegations, they highlighted her inconsistency about her views on Trump, forwarding emails from 2015 and as recently as January 2016 in which she expressed friendly feelings about Trump and even asked about a job helping to do his campaign trail makeup.
As Harth wrote in an August 2015 email [ http://interactive.guim.co.uk/embed/documentcloud/index.html?docid=2996186-HarthEmails ] forwarded by Trump’s campaign: “I also would like to show my support for Donald and his campaign. I am offering my services to do his grooming and getting him perfectly camera ready for photos and Hi-Definition TV. He knows better than anybody how important image is.”
In another email from October 2015, she praised Trump for “doing a tremendous job of shaking things up in the United States” and added: “I am definitely Team Trump!”
Harth said those emails were written months before Trump called her integrity into question. She also defended her action, as a businesswoman who has never been too proud to look for help where she needs it, even if it smacks of opportunism.
Meanwhile the fact that Trump has an army of staffers and family defending him is part of what inspired her to speak out, she said.
“Nobody was defending me, that’s why I’m talking,” Harth said. “You can believe it or not, but I went through hell and I still have to relive this again. And I just, I’m horrified that I have to think about this again.”
Michael Cohen, executive vice-president and special counsel to Donald Trump [ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/donaldtrump ], responded by email to a Guardian request for comment, saying: “It is disheartening that one has to dignify a response to the below absurd query. Mr Trump denies each and every statement made by Ms Harth as these 24-year-old allegations lack any merit or veracity.
“Hope [Mr Trump’s spokeswoman Hope Hicks] will forward to you under separate e-mail, a series of e-mails documenting Ms Harth’s support of Mr Trump, the race for the White House as well as seeking a job opportunity with the campaign.”
In an earlier phone call, Cohen said Harth had “massive credibility issues”.
Speaking in Cleveland at the Republican national convention on Wednesday, Roger Stone, a veteran strategist and longtime Trump adviser, dismissed the allegations, saying: “I have an excellent bullshit detector.”
Stone added: “A verbal agreement is entirely unprovable … So it’s more he said, she said. Sure sounds like bullshit to me.”
Such responses from the Trump camp aren’t new and neither is the lawsuit, which Harth brought forward in 1997. She dropped it weeks later after Trump settled an outstanding business lawsuit from her partner Houraney claiming he broke contract by backing out of the American Dream festival. (Houraney sued for $5m but settled with Trump for a smaller, undisclosed amount.)
Houraney met Harth when she was still in high school and though he didn’t witness any of the alleged incidents with Trump, aside from that first meeting in Trump Tower, Houraney has never doubted her. “I know they’re all true,” he said of the allegations. “I knew her way too long to think she could make up stuff like that, It wasn’t in her. She wasn’t capable of making up the things she said in that thing.”
Harth told the Guardian she expected very little from Trump. “I’m not going to get an apology from him. That would be nice, but he – I don’t fully expect one. But he really should have been taught, if you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say anything, OK? Don’t call me a liar.
“He didn’t have to say anything. For once, he should have closed his mouth. He didn’t have to comment. We were on great – not great, I’ll take that back – we were on good terms, friendly terms. He didn’t – he started this. What is happening now is of his own making, OK? I was quiet.”
Related
Jill Harth's allegations against Trump paint a picture of an entitled narcissist
After 20 years of loyal silence, a woman who claims Trump assaulted her drew the line at publicly being called a liar. We should listen to her, before it’s too late
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/20/jill-harth-donald-trump-allegations-narcissist
© 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/20/donald-trump-sexual-assault-allegations-jill-harth-interview [with embedded video and documents]
--
A Declaration by American Evangelicals Concerning Donald Trump
Imperfect elections and flawed candidates often make for complicated and difficult choices for Christians. But sometimes historic moments arise when more is at stake than partisan politics--when the meaning and integrity of our faith hangs in the balance. This is one of those moments.
A significant mistake in American politics is the media’s continued identification of “evangelical” with mostly white, politically conservative, older men. We are not those evangelicals. The media’s narrow labels of our community perpetuate stereotypes, ignore our diversity, and fail to accurately represent views expressed by the full body of evangelical Christians.
We are Americans of African and European descent, Latino/a, Asian American, and Native American. We are women and men, as well as younger and older evangelical Christians. We come from a wide range of denominations, churches, and political orientations.
We believe in the unity of the body of Christ, but we acknowledge the diverse nature of a community whose faith is biblical and evangelical. And we are growing. Given the rich diversity within our unity, we call upon the political world to hear all our voices, and for the media to acknowledge that the evangelical community is quite diverse.
As evangelical Christians, we believe our hope and allegiance rests in the person of Jesus Christ, Savior of the world, and Lord of our lives. That is why no politician, party, movement, or nation can ever command our ultimate loyalty. As citizens both of the Kingdom of God and this world, we vote with humility, knowing that our favored candidates always fall short of biblical values. We recognize that despite our unity in Christ, we will inevitably disagree about which political stances come closest to the heart of God for our nation.
We believe that the centrality of Christ, the importance of both conversion and discipleship, the authority of the Scriptures, and the “good news” of the gospel, especially for the poor and vulnerable, should prevail over ideological politics, and that we must respond when evangelicalism becomes dangerously identified with one particular candidate whose statements, practice, personal morality, and ideology risk damaging our witness to the gospel before the watching world.
We believe that racism strikes at the heart of the gospel; we believe that racial justice and reconciliation is at the core of the message of Jesus.
We believe the candidacy of Donald J. Trump has given voice to a movement that affirms racist elements in white culture—both explicit and implicit. Regardless of his recent retraction, Mr. Trump has spread racist “birther” falsehoods for five years trying to delegitimize and humiliate our first African-American president, characterizing him as “the other” and not a real American citizen. He uses fear to demonize and degrade immigrants, foreigners, and people from different racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds. He launched his presidential campaign by demonizing Mexicans, immigrants, and Muslims, and has repeatedly spoken against migrants and refugees coming to this country—those whom Jesus calls “the stranger” in Matthew 25, where he says that how we treat them is how we treat him. Trump has steadily refused to clearly and aggressively confront extremist voices and movements of white supremacy, some of whom now call him their “champion,” and has therefore helped to take the dangerous fringes of white nationalism in America to the mainstream of politics.
Mr. Trump has fueled white American nationalism with xenophobic appeals and religious intolerance at the expense of gospel values, democratic principles, and important international relationships. He mocks women and the sanctity of marriage vows, disregards facts and the accountability to truth, and worships wealth and shameful materialism, while taking our weakening culture of civility to nearly unprecedented levels with continuing personal attacks on others, including attacking a federal judge based purely on his Mexican heritage, mocking a disabled reporter, and humiliating a beauty pageant winner for her weight and Latina ethnicity—to give just a few examples.
Because we believe that racial bigotry has been a cornerstone of this campaign, it is a foundational matter of the gospel for us in this election, and not just another issue. This is not just a social problem, but a fundamental wrong. Racism is America's original sin. Its brazen use to win elections threatens to reverse real progress on racial equity and set America back.
Donald Trump's campaign is the most recent and extreme version of a history of racialized politics that has been pursued and about which white evangelicals, in particular, have been silent. The silence in previous times has set the environment for what we now see.
For this reason, we cannot ignore this bigotry, set it aside, just focus on other issues, or forget the things Mr. Trump has consistently said and done. No matter what other issues we also care about, we have to make it publicly clear that Mr. Trump’s racial and religious bigotry and treatment of women is morally unacceptable to us as evangelical Christians, as we attempt to model Jesus’ command to “love your neighbors as yourself.”
Whether we support Mr. Trump’s political opponent is not the question here. Hillary Clinton is both supported and distrusted by a variety of Christian voters. We, undersigned evangelicals, simply will not tolerate the racial, religious, and gender bigotry that Donald Trump has consistently and deliberately fueled, no matter how else we choose to vote or not to vote.
We see this election as a significant teachable moment for our churches and our nation to bring about long-needed repentance from our racial sin. Out of this belief we have written this declaration, inviting you to be part of what we have learned from one another and long to see in the churches and the world—a commitment to justice and the dignity of all human lives.
We invite you to stand with us, join in this declaration, and pass it along to your friends, congregants, pastors, students, and the diverse evangelical church.
[signatures]
https://www.change.org/p/donald-trump-a-declaration-by-american-evangelicals-concerning-donald-trump [with currently over 15,000 signatories]
--
in addition to (linked in) the post to which this is a reply and preceding and (any future other) following, see also (linked in):
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=125633047 and preceding (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=125667245 and preceding (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=125667316 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=125668670 and preceding (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=125669719 and preceding (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=125669668 (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=125669996 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=125670526 (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=125670586 and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=125671724 and preceding (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=125672365 (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=125672641 and preceding (and any future following)
By MAGGIE HABERMAN
OCT. 8, 2016
For hours on Friday night, the political world waited for the rarest of expressions from Donald J. Trump [ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/donald-trump-on-the-issues.html ] — a heartfelt apology.
What viewers got was anything but.
During a 90-second videotaped appearance [ http://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000004698416/trump-responds-to-outrage-over-lewd-remarks.html ], Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, offered a strikingly brief articulation of regret for a decade-old audiotape [ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/politics/donald-trump-women.html ] in which he boasted about grabbing women’s genitals and said he could have his way with women because of his fame.
But his real message, which appeared early Saturday, was one of defiance. He described the controversy that upended the Republican Party for most of Friday as a mere “distraction,” and said that his vulgar remarks captured on the tape were nothing compared with the way Bill and Hillary Clinton [ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/hillary-clinton-on-the-issues.html ] had mistreated women.
If anything, Mr. Trump’s videotaped statement was a truncated version of a speech that he had given countless times. And it did not reflect the several hours of conference calls and strategy meetings among his top aides, who were at first stunned and then nearly paralyzed by the revelation of the tape, which they worried would be fatal to his White House hopes.
“That took 10 hours?” an incredulous Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist, asked on CNN immediately after the statement.
With his brow furrowed and his face a tight scowl, Mr. Trump sat hunched in a chair inside Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, with the glittering nighttime New York City skyline behind him.
“I’ve never said I’m a perfect person, nor pretended to be someone that I’m not,” said Mr. Trump, a 70-year-old real estate developer and former reality television star.
Then came the apologetic part.
“I’ve said and done things I regret, and the words released today on this more-than-a-decade-old video are one of them,” Mr. Trump said of the hot-mike recording of him bragging to Billy Bush [ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/politics/billy-bush-donald-trump-video.html ], then the host of NBC’s “Access Hollywood,” about his groping and uninvited kissing of women.
“Anyone who knows me knows these words don’t reflect who I am,” Mr. Trump continued.
“I said it, I was wrong, and I apologize,” he said.
Oddly, Mr. Trump seemed to frame his comments not as sincere concern about those he may have hurt or offended, but as part of his own journey, describing his growth as a person and how humbling it has been for him to campaign across the nation and learn of other people’s worries and travails.
“I’ve traveled the country talking about change for America, but my travels have also changed me,” he said, describing meeting mothers who have lost children and people who have lost their jobs.
“I pledge to be a better man tomorrow and will never, ever let you down,” Mr. Trump said.
Grudging though they seemed, Mr. Trump’s comments were a marked departure from his lifelong resistance to any admission of fault. Mr. Trump values strength and power and disparages weakness. His usual response, when criticized or hurt, has been to counterpunch forcefully.
Before the release of the short statement, advisers to Mr. Trump had huddled with him at Trump Tower, along with his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner, to discuss how to respond to the crisis. The advisers cautioned against holding a news conference, something that had been discussed, because it could become unwieldy and spin out of his control. They realized they needed to address the issue quickly, at a minimum to try to stop the defections of Republican officials who had begun to shun and loudly denounce him.
But one adviser to Mr. Trump cautioned before the statement that if the candidate mentioned Mrs. Clinton, it would fail.
Mr. Trump did just that.
“Hillary Clinton and her kind have run our country into the ground,” Mr. Trump said. “I’ve said some foolish things, but there’s a big difference between the words and actions of other people. Bill Clinton [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/bill_clinton/index.html ] has actually abused women, and Hillary has bullied, attacked, shamed and intimidated his victims.”
Mr. Trump then turned the focus to his second debate against Mrs. Clinton, less than 48 hours away.
Ever the performer and intimidator, he added, with a hint of menace in his voice: “We will discuss this more in the coming days. See you at the debate on Sunday.”
Related Coverage
Transcript of Donald Trump’s Videotaped Apology
OCT. 8, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/donald-trump-apology-statement.html
Donald Trump Apology Caps Day of Outrage Over Lewd Tape
OCT. 7, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/politics/donald-trump-women.html [excerpted and linked at/see (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=125669719 and preceding (and any future following)]
Donald Trump’s Lewd Comments About Women
OCT. 7, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000004698018/donald-trumps-lewd-comments-about-women.html
© 2016 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/politics/donald-trump-apology.html [with embedded video]
*
Melania Trump Statement
October 08, 2016
"The words my husband used are unacceptable and offensive to me. This does not represent the man that I know. He has the heart and mind of a leader. I hope people will accept his apology, as I have, and focus on the important issues facing our nation and the world."
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/melania-trump-statement
--
Donald Trump, Groper in Chief
Donald Trump with Jill Harth in 1992.
George Houraney
Jill Harth at home in Queens. Behind her is a 1996 portrait of her by Ralph Wolfe Cowan, who has also painted Donald Trump.
Chad Batka for The New York Times
By Nicholas Kristof
OCT. 7, 2016
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 [ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/us/politics/donald-trump-women.html ], most recently in a 2005 recording [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-recorded-having-extremely-lewd-conversation-about-women-in-2005/2016/10/07/3b9ce776-8cb4-11e6-bf8a-3d26847eeed4_story.html ] 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.
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.”
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 [ https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2016/04/16/trump/P6jVWXAzaG12Ou5dPXYCDL/story.html ] 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 [ http://www.jillharth.com/ ] 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.”
Related Coverage
Watch: Nick Kristof Discusses This Column and More on Donald Trump, on Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/kristof/videos/10154405172442891/
Lewd Donald Trump Tape Is a Breaking Point for Many in the G.O.P.
OCT. 8, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/09/us/politics/donald-trump-campaign.html
Opinion Editorial
The Sleaziness of Donald Trump
OCT. 7, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/opinion/the-sleaziness-of-donald-trump.html
© 2016 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/09/opinion/sunday/donald-trump-groper-in-chief.html [with comments]
*
Jill Harth speaks out about alleged groping by Donald Trump
Donald Trump in 1992 at his Mar-a-Lago estate, where Harth says ‘he pushed me up against the wall, and had his hands all over me and tried to get up my dress’.
Photograph: Alamy
Harth said of her wish for an apology from Trump: ‘I don’t fully expect one.’
Photograph: Guardian
Harth stands by claims of incident described in 1997 lawsuit as ‘attempted rape’ and wants apology from Donald Trump: ‘Don’t call me a liar’
Lucia Graves in New York
Wednesday 20 July 2016, Updated/Republished Saturday 8 October 2016 14.15 EDT
A woman at the centre of sexual assault allegations against Donald Trump has spoken for the first time in detail about her personal experience with the billionaire tycoon who this week became the Republican nominee for president [ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/19/donald-trump-nominated-president-republican-convention ].
Jill Harth, a makeup artist, has stayed quiet for almost 20 years about the way Trump pursued her, and – according to a lawsuit [ https://www.scribd.com/doc/300193678/1997-Jill-Harth-Lawsuit ] she instigated – cornered her and groped her in his daughter’s bedroom.
After Trump mounted his campaign for the White House, details emerged of the 1997 complaint, in which Harth accused him of “attempted ‘rape’”.
She said she was quickly inundated with interview requests from major US television networks, but resolved not to speak about the events – until Trump publicly said in May that her claims were “meritless” and his daughter Ivanka gave an interview in which she said her father was “not a groper”.
Harth, who feels she has been publicly branded a liar and believes her business has suffered because of her association with the allegations, decided to speak out about her experience with Trump because she wants an apology.
In an hour-long interview at the Guardian’s New York office on Tuesday, Harth said she stands by her charges against Trump, which run from low-grade sexual harassment to an episode her lawyers described in the lawsuit as “attempted ‘rape’”.
She first met Trump in December 1992 at his offices in Trump Tower, where she and her then romantic partner, George Houraney, were making a business presentation. The couple wanted to recruit Trump to back their American Dream festival, in which Harth oversaw a pin-up competition known as American Dream Calendar Girls. Harth described that meeting as “the highlight of our career”.
But in other ways, it was something of a lowlight: Trump took an interest in Harth immediately and began subjecting her to a steady string of unwanted sexual advances, detailed by Harth in her complaint.
There was the initial leering in that first December meeting in Trump Tower, and the inappropriate questions after her relationship status. It continued the next night over dinner at the Plaza Hotel’s Oak Room, where at a dinner with beauty pageant contestants she alleges he groped her under the table.
It culminated in January 1993, when Harth and Houraney were visiting his Florida mansion, Mar-a-Lago, to finalize and then celebrate the beauty pageant deal with a party.
After business concluded, Harth and Houraney were on tour of Mar-a-Lago along with a group of young pageant contestants – Trump wanted to “see the quality of the girls he was sponsoring”, Harth recalled – when he pulled her aside into one of the children’s bedrooms.
“He pushed me up against the wall, and had his hands all over me and tried to get up my dress again,” Harth said, “and I had to physically say: ‘What are you doing? Stop it.’ It was a shocking thing to have him do this because he knew I was with George, he knew they were in the next room. And how could he be doing this when I’m there for business?”
Speaking as Republicans gathered in Cleveland to formally declare Trump as the party’s candidate in the November general election, Harth said she had been very reluctant to talk after the sexual assault allegations resurfaced, “because honestly, it was painful for me to have to do it again. It was stressful, it gave me anxiety, it definitely wounded my marriage – it wasn’t the death knell, but it wounded it, it was stressful having to handle this.”
She recalled how Trump – who had just gone through a divorce from his first wife, Ivana, and was in a relationship with Marla Maples, who would become his second wife – pursued her and urged her to leave Houraney.
“Trump did everything in his power to get me to leave him. He constantly called me and said: ‘I love you, baby, I’m going to be the best lover you ever had. What are you doing with that loser, you need to be with me, you need to step it up to the big leagues.’
“He was constantly working on me during that time and that took a toll on me. But I moved on. I’m a forgiving type person, OK? I’m a Christian, I moved on.”
‘They tried to get me to say it never happened’
Trump’s decision to run for president brought the question to the fore for her once more. And initially, she said she was inclined to let bygones be bygones.
She concedes she even found herself getting excited at the thought that someone she knew so well was running for president.
A recent Trump rally she attended seemed to confirm her decision to lie low. “‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said, ‘I’m not going to say anything bad, we’ve moved on, we’re friendly,’” Harth recalled in her interview with the Guardian.
When Trump thanked her and gave her a hug, she thought he wouldn’t say anything either.
The interaction, Harth said, reaffirmed her decision to stay quiet. That is, until she saw Trump dismiss media reports referencing her case as “meritless”, or worse.
After the New York Times ran a story [ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/us/politics/donald-trump-women.html ] in May this year about Trump’s history with women, including an account of Harth’s story, Trump’s campaign even reached out to her to pressure her to take back her account, she told the Guardian on Tuesday.
“His office – and I have it on my voicemails that he called, that they called – they asked me to recant everything when the New York Times article came out. They were trying to get me to say it never happened and I made it up. And I said I’m not doing that,” she recalled. Trump’s office denied this.
She was further upset by an interview Trump’s daughter Ivanka gave in the wake of the New York Times article saying her dad is “not a groper”.
“I understand that the girl wanted to defend her dad, being it’s her dad,” she said, “but what did she know? She was 10 years old! She was 10 years old at the time. She didn’t know what her father was about, what he was doing, how he was acting.”
Such statements felt defamatory to Harth, adding insult to injury. That’s when she hired attorney Lisa Bloom to demand that Trump retract his statements that are, as Bloom put it, “effectively calling her a liar”.
“Jill is very clear that she is not a liar,” Bloom said. “And her reputation is important to her. And her living a life free of this kind of stress is important to her. So we’re calling on not only Mr Trump, Ivanka Trump, too.”
The renewed controversy comes as Trump prepares to give his keynote speech in Cleveland on Thursday. It also comes as Roger Ailes, the chairman and CEO of Trump-friendly Fox News, is in the process of being ousted [ https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jul/19/roger-ailes-megyn-kelly-alleges-sexual-harrassment ] following a sexual harassment suit filed by a former anchor.
When Trump’s office was asked to respond to Harth’s allegations, they highlighted her inconsistency about her views on Trump, forwarding emails from 2015 and as recently as January 2016 in which she expressed friendly feelings about Trump and even asked about a job helping to do his campaign trail makeup.
As Harth wrote in an August 2015 email [ http://interactive.guim.co.uk/embed/documentcloud/index.html?docid=2996186-HarthEmails ] forwarded by Trump’s campaign: “I also would like to show my support for Donald and his campaign. I am offering my services to do his grooming and getting him perfectly camera ready for photos and Hi-Definition TV. He knows better than anybody how important image is.”
In another email from October 2015, she praised Trump for “doing a tremendous job of shaking things up in the United States” and added: “I am definitely Team Trump!”
Harth said those emails were written months before Trump called her integrity into question. She also defended her action, as a businesswoman who has never been too proud to look for help where she needs it, even if it smacks of opportunism.
Meanwhile the fact that Trump has an army of staffers and family defending him is part of what inspired her to speak out, she said.
“Nobody was defending me, that’s why I’m talking,” Harth said. “You can believe it or not, but I went through hell and I still have to relive this again. And I just, I’m horrified that I have to think about this again.”
Michael Cohen, executive vice-president and special counsel to Donald Trump [ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/donaldtrump ], responded by email to a Guardian request for comment, saying: “It is disheartening that one has to dignify a response to the below absurd query. Mr Trump denies each and every statement made by Ms Harth as these 24-year-old allegations lack any merit or veracity.
“Hope [Mr Trump’s spokeswoman Hope Hicks] will forward to you under separate e-mail, a series of e-mails documenting Ms Harth’s support of Mr Trump, the race for the White House as well as seeking a job opportunity with the campaign.”
In an earlier phone call, Cohen said Harth had “massive credibility issues”.
Speaking in Cleveland at the Republican national convention on Wednesday, Roger Stone, a veteran strategist and longtime Trump adviser, dismissed the allegations, saying: “I have an excellent bullshit detector.”
Stone added: “A verbal agreement is entirely unprovable … So it’s more he said, she said. Sure sounds like bullshit to me.”
Such responses from the Trump camp aren’t new and neither is the lawsuit, which Harth brought forward in 1997. She dropped it weeks later after Trump settled an outstanding business lawsuit from her partner Houraney claiming he broke contract by backing out of the American Dream festival. (Houraney sued for $5m but settled with Trump for a smaller, undisclosed amount.)
Houraney met Harth when she was still in high school and though he didn’t witness any of the alleged incidents with Trump, aside from that first meeting in Trump Tower, Houraney has never doubted her. “I know they’re all true,” he said of the allegations. “I knew her way too long to think she could make up stuff like that, It wasn’t in her. She wasn’t capable of making up the things she said in that thing.”
Harth told the Guardian she expected very little from Trump. “I’m not going to get an apology from him. That would be nice, but he – I don’t fully expect one. But he really should have been taught, if you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say anything, OK? Don’t call me a liar.
“He didn’t have to say anything. For once, he should have closed his mouth. He didn’t have to comment. We were on great – not great, I’ll take that back – we were on good terms, friendly terms. He didn’t – he started this. What is happening now is of his own making, OK? I was quiet.”
Related
Jill Harth's allegations against Trump paint a picture of an entitled narcissist
After 20 years of loyal silence, a woman who claims Trump assaulted her drew the line at publicly being called a liar. We should listen to her, before it’s too late
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/20/jill-harth-donald-trump-allegations-narcissist
© 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/20/donald-trump-sexual-assault-allegations-jill-harth-interview [with embedded video and documents]
--
A Declaration by American Evangelicals Concerning Donald Trump
Imperfect elections and flawed candidates often make for complicated and difficult choices for Christians. But sometimes historic moments arise when more is at stake than partisan politics--when the meaning and integrity of our faith hangs in the balance. This is one of those moments.
A significant mistake in American politics is the media’s continued identification of “evangelical” with mostly white, politically conservative, older men. We are not those evangelicals. The media’s narrow labels of our community perpetuate stereotypes, ignore our diversity, and fail to accurately represent views expressed by the full body of evangelical Christians.
We are Americans of African and European descent, Latino/a, Asian American, and Native American. We are women and men, as well as younger and older evangelical Christians. We come from a wide range of denominations, churches, and political orientations.
We believe in the unity of the body of Christ, but we acknowledge the diverse nature of a community whose faith is biblical and evangelical. And we are growing. Given the rich diversity within our unity, we call upon the political world to hear all our voices, and for the media to acknowledge that the evangelical community is quite diverse.
As evangelical Christians, we believe our hope and allegiance rests in the person of Jesus Christ, Savior of the world, and Lord of our lives. That is why no politician, party, movement, or nation can ever command our ultimate loyalty. As citizens both of the Kingdom of God and this world, we vote with humility, knowing that our favored candidates always fall short of biblical values. We recognize that despite our unity in Christ, we will inevitably disagree about which political stances come closest to the heart of God for our nation.
We believe that the centrality of Christ, the importance of both conversion and discipleship, the authority of the Scriptures, and the “good news” of the gospel, especially for the poor and vulnerable, should prevail over ideological politics, and that we must respond when evangelicalism becomes dangerously identified with one particular candidate whose statements, practice, personal morality, and ideology risk damaging our witness to the gospel before the watching world.
We believe that racism strikes at the heart of the gospel; we believe that racial justice and reconciliation is at the core of the message of Jesus.
We believe the candidacy of Donald J. Trump has given voice to a movement that affirms racist elements in white culture—both explicit and implicit. Regardless of his recent retraction, Mr. Trump has spread racist “birther” falsehoods for five years trying to delegitimize and humiliate our first African-American president, characterizing him as “the other” and not a real American citizen. He uses fear to demonize and degrade immigrants, foreigners, and people from different racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds. He launched his presidential campaign by demonizing Mexicans, immigrants, and Muslims, and has repeatedly spoken against migrants and refugees coming to this country—those whom Jesus calls “the stranger” in Matthew 25, where he says that how we treat them is how we treat him. Trump has steadily refused to clearly and aggressively confront extremist voices and movements of white supremacy, some of whom now call him their “champion,” and has therefore helped to take the dangerous fringes of white nationalism in America to the mainstream of politics.
Mr. Trump has fueled white American nationalism with xenophobic appeals and religious intolerance at the expense of gospel values, democratic principles, and important international relationships. He mocks women and the sanctity of marriage vows, disregards facts and the accountability to truth, and worships wealth and shameful materialism, while taking our weakening culture of civility to nearly unprecedented levels with continuing personal attacks on others, including attacking a federal judge based purely on his Mexican heritage, mocking a disabled reporter, and humiliating a beauty pageant winner for her weight and Latina ethnicity—to give just a few examples.
Because we believe that racial bigotry has been a cornerstone of this campaign, it is a foundational matter of the gospel for us in this election, and not just another issue. This is not just a social problem, but a fundamental wrong. Racism is America's original sin. Its brazen use to win elections threatens to reverse real progress on racial equity and set America back.
Donald Trump's campaign is the most recent and extreme version of a history of racialized politics that has been pursued and about which white evangelicals, in particular, have been silent. The silence in previous times has set the environment for what we now see.
For this reason, we cannot ignore this bigotry, set it aside, just focus on other issues, or forget the things Mr. Trump has consistently said and done. No matter what other issues we also care about, we have to make it publicly clear that Mr. Trump’s racial and religious bigotry and treatment of women is morally unacceptable to us as evangelical Christians, as we attempt to model Jesus’ command to “love your neighbors as yourself.”
Whether we support Mr. Trump’s political opponent is not the question here. Hillary Clinton is both supported and distrusted by a variety of Christian voters. We, undersigned evangelicals, simply will not tolerate the racial, religious, and gender bigotry that Donald Trump has consistently and deliberately fueled, no matter how else we choose to vote or not to vote.
We see this election as a significant teachable moment for our churches and our nation to bring about long-needed repentance from our racial sin. Out of this belief we have written this declaration, inviting you to be part of what we have learned from one another and long to see in the churches and the world—a commitment to justice and the dignity of all human lives.
We invite you to stand with us, join in this declaration, and pass it along to your friends, congregants, pastors, students, and the diverse evangelical church.
[signatures]
https://www.change.org/p/donald-trump-a-declaration-by-american-evangelicals-concerning-donald-trump [with currently over 15,000 signatories]
--
in addition to (linked in) the post to which this is a reply and preceding and (any future other) following, see also (linked in):
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=125633047 and preceding (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=125667245 and preceding (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=125667316 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=125668670 and preceding (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=125669719 and preceding (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=125669668 (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=125669996 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=125670526 (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=125670586 and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=125671724 and preceding (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=125672365 (and any future following)
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=125672641 and preceding (and any future following)
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
Discover What Traders Are Watching
Explore small cap ideas before they hit the headlines.
