NY- A woman testified Tuesday that Donald Trump sexually assaulted her with what appeared to be “40 million hands” on an airline flight in the late 1970s, years before writer E. Jean Carroll said the former president he sexually assaulted her in a Manhattan department store.
Meanwhile, Trump’s lawyer said the tycoon decided not to testify, answering the biggest remaining question about the closely watched case. Trump has given deposition testimony under oath, and excerpts can be played for the jury.
Jessica Leeds, 81, of Asheville, North Carolina, told jurors in a civil trial stemming from Carroll’s lawsuit that the former president grabbed her chest and reached down her skirt as they sat next to each other. another in first class on a plane bound for New York City.
After a few seconds, he said, he broke free of Trump, told him “I don’t need this” and headed for the back of the plane.
“There was no conversation. It was like out of nowhere. It was like a fight,” Leeds testified. “He was trying to kiss me, trying to pull me to him. He was grabbing my breasts. It was as if he had 40 million hands. It was like a fight between the two of us.”
Carroll’s lawyers called Leeds to the witness stand in an attempt to show that Trump has a history of assaulting women and that Carroll’s claims were part of a pattern, not a single incident. Another woman is expected to testify at trial that she, too, was a victim of the tycoon.
Trump, a Republican, has repeatedly denied the women’s claims.
He maintains that the accusations are politically motivated attempts to tarnish his reputation and deny him the White House.
She has said that Carroll lied to sell books and that she is not his “type.”
Leeds first went public with her account of the alleged assault on the plane in the final weeks of Trump’s 2016 campaign, telling jurors she decided to do so because she was “furious” at Trump’s claim in a debate that she had never touched women against their will.
Leeds said she was in her early 30s, working in sales and sitting economy class aboard a Braniff Airways flight from Dallas or Atlanta to New York’s LaGuardia Airport, probably in 1979, when a flight attendant invited her to sit in the only empty aisle seat in the first class cabin, next to Trump.
