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Jessica Leeds, who accuses Trump, told reporters at Trump Tower on Monday that “he is a sexual predator.”
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Her comments came in response to Trump’s statement that he would never have “singled her out” to attack.
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When asked if she plans to file a defamation lawsuit, she replied: “No decision has been made yet.”
During a press conference at Trump Tower in Manhattan on Friday, former President Donald Trump wanted the world to know that he never sexually assaulted Jessica Leeds.
“She wouldn’t have been the chosen one,” he told reporters, implying that her appearance did not meet his standards.
On Monday, Leeds held her own press conference to confront him about the insult. With Trump Tower as a backdrop, she called the GOP presidential candidate “a sexual predator” and said she has yet to decide whether to press charges.
“He attacked me 50 years ago and he continues to attack me today,” she told a group of reporters gathered on Fifth Avenue. She called Trump’s “chosen one” comments “really bizarre.”
“I have to admit I did laugh,” she said of hearing the comment. “It’s a little scary and a little hard to process. He seems a little obsessed. But here I am.”
Leeds accuses Trump of groping her while sitting next to her in the first class cabin of a flight in 1979.
She first publicly raised her accusation in 2016, during the presidential campaign, telling The New York Times that Trump had groped her while they were sitting next to each other in the first-class cabin of a flight to New York.
Leeds told her story in most detail in the spring of 2023, on the witness stand in a Manhattan federal court as part of the sexual abuse and defamation case brought by writer E. Jean Carroll.
“He grabbed my breasts,” she testified at Carroll’s trial. “It was like he had 40 trillion hands, and it was a struggle between the two of us.”
Leeds, then a businesswoman, saw Trump again about two years later at a charity fundraiser, she testified.
“He said, ‘I remember you. You’re that bitch from the plane,'” Leeds told the Carroll jury. “Well, it was like a bucket of cold water was thrown over my head.”
During appeal arguments Friday, Trump’s lawyers argued that Leeds’ testimony should never have been allowed because of the specific jurisdictional laws surrounding aircraft. (The three-judge panel was skeptical.)
Shortly after the parties left federal court, Trump called reporters to Trump Tower, where he smeared Leeds, Carroll and a third prosecutor and trial witness, Natasha Stoynoff, in a press conference following oral arguments in the appeal of Carroll’s case.
Leeds gave a brief but no less powerful version of her story to reporters Monday, saying she did so “because I believe it’s important to remind voters.”
“All of a sudden this man started grabbing me and kissing me,” she said of the flight. “He had 47 arms, like an octopus.”
“When he decided to put his hand up my skirt, it gave me enough energy to walk away from him,” she added.
At Monday’s press conference, Leeds said she first went public with her allegations after Trump denied sexually assaulting women during a presidential debate, to set the record straight. She urged people not to vote for Trump in the 2024 election.
“We simply cannot allow this person into the White House anymore,” she said Monday.
Carroll’s 2023 defamation and sexual abuse jury found Trump liable for Carroll’s sexual abuse and defamation, awarding her $5 million in damages. A second jury, in January of this year, ordered Trump to pay Carroll an additional $83 million for additional defamation claims.
Trump’s sexual assault lawsuit included only Carroll’s claims. But testimony from Leeds and Stoynoff — as well as the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump brags about grabbing women by the genitals — was admitted as evidence to show a pattern of behavior by Trump.
Carroll’s lawsuit alleged that in the mid-1990s, Trump cornered her in the dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman, a luxury department store a short walk from Trump Tower, and sexually assaulted her.
She filed her sexual abuse lawsuit under the Adult Survivor’s Act, a New York law that temporarily opened up civil claims that would otherwise be barred by the statute of limitations.
Carroll also filed a defamation lawsuit against Trump after he called her a liar by denying her allegations and insulted her appearance by calling her “not my type.”
The plane incident Leeds describes did not happen in New York, but decades ago, making it difficult for her to file a sexual abuse lawsuit.
But Trump’s denial of her story on Friday may have opened up a new opportunity for a defamation lawsuit.
“I’m considering a number of options in light of his latest comments,” she told reporters Monday. “But no decision has been made.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
