Ahead of the 2024 Presidential elections, former US President Donald Trump has landed in yet another controversy due to his alleged "violent" sexual desires. This time, a woman testified Trump molested her with what seemed like “40 zillion hands” on an airline flight in late 1970.
Jessica Leeds, who is now enjoying her 80s, on Tuesday told jurors at a civil trial arising from Carroll’s lawsuit that Trump grabbed her chest and ran his hand up her skirt as they sat side by side in first class on a New York City-bound jet. After a few seconds, she said, she wriggled free of Trump, told him “I don’t need this” and stormed to the back of the plane.
Leeds, who hails from Asheville, North Carolina, claimed, in her late 30s, was working in sales and sitting in a coach aboard a Braniff Airways flight from Dallas or Atlanta to New York’s LaGuardia Airport. She recalled it was 1979. According to her, a flight attendant invited her to sit in the only empty aisle seat in the first-class cabin, next to Trump.
Trump introduced himself, Leeds said, but she didn’t know who he was at the time. Working then as a real estate developer, Trump had not yet achieved the heights of his fame and was still a few years from opening Trump Tower in Manhattan.
“There was no conversation. It was like out of the blue. It was like a tussle,” Leeds testified. “He was trying to kiss me, trying to pull me towards him. He was grabbing my breasts. It was like he had 40 zillion hands. It was like a tussling match between the two of us.”
"Trump kissed me and groped me"
Leeds said she sat with Trump for several hours and ate a nice, first-class meal, but that their conversation was otherwise forgettable. Then, she said, “All of a sudden Trump decided to kiss me and grope me.” Leeds said she fought back as Trump seemed to get more aggressive, pressing his weight into her, jostling her seat and pinning her in it. No passengers intervened, and no employees from the now-defunct airline came to her rescue, she said.
“It was when he started putting his hand up my skirt that gave me strength. I managed to wriggle out of my seat and storm back to my seat in coach. I don’t think there was a word or a sound made by either one of us,” Leeds recalled. She said the encounter, “seemed like forever, but it probably was just a few seconds.”
Why did Leeds decide to remain silent?
After landing in New York, Leeds said she stayed on the plane until everyone else left to avoid running into Trump again. She said she kept the incident to herself, regarding it as one of the “rigours of travel.”
She did not report it to the airline, the police or her boss because, she said, it was an era when “women didn’t complain about things in the workplace.”
A few years later, Leeds said she saw Trump at a Manhattan gala with his first wife, Ivana, who was pregnant. But Leeds didn’t say anything. Instead, she told jurors it was Trump who piped up. She recalled him using a crass word in recognizing her as the woman “from the aeroplane.”
What does Trump say?
Leeds first went public with her account of the alleged airplane assault in the final weeks of Trump’s 2016 campaign, telling jurors that she decided to do so because she was “furious” about Trump’s claim at a debate that he had never touched women against their will.
Trump, a Republican, has repeatedly denied the women’s claims. He contends the allegations are politically motivated attempts to smear his reputation and deny him the White House. Notably, like in the case of writer E. Jean Carroll's rape allegations, this time too, used similar language in denying Leeds’ allegations, telling supporters at a 2016 rally, “Believe me, she would not be my first choice.”
(With inputs from agency)
