Even for Donald Trump, these comments about women are shocking

Just a few weeks before the seismic 2016 election, Donald Trump was accused by two women of sexual assault in a damning New York Times article. In the piece, it was outlined howbusinesswoman Jessica Leeds had allegedly been assaulted by Trump during a flight to New York in the late 1970s.

Days after the allegations broke, the Washington Post then obtained and published a now-infamous Access Hollywood recording of Trump from 2005, in which he could be heard saying: “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the p***y. You can do anything.”

He still got in, becoming the 45th president of the United States on 8 November, 2016.

Then, three years into his premiership, former Elle magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll came forward and said Trump raped her in the dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman in 1996.

It wasn’t until seven years later, in May 2023, that Trump was found liable for defaming and sexually abusing Carroll and ordered to pay her $5m in damages. But now hislawyers are arguing for a retrial, claiming the evidence used in the case was “highly inadmissible”.

None of this surprises me – the fact that he was found to have assaulted Carroll last year, nor that he’s continuing to try to wriggle out of it. But what does shock me is what Trump has said – and continues to say – about the women he’s accused of abusing.

On Friday, during a press conference in New York, he said of Carroll: “I never met her. I have never touched her. I would have no interest in meeting her in any shape or form,” before claiming that her testimony was “a made-up fabricated story by somebody just