Trump for women!

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A Fox News reporter has added her name to the list of nearly two dozen women who have accused Donald Trump of making unwanted sexual advances towards them. In a book published next week, Fox & Friends fill-in host Courtney Friel claims Trump propositioned her before he became US president. “You should come up to my office sometime, so we can kiss,” Friel says Trump told her, adding that he considered her “the hottest one at Fox News”. The claims, reported by the New York Daily News, are contained in Friel’s upcoming memoir, Tonight At 10: Kicking Booze and Breaking News. Friel, 39, says Trump’s come-on was made during a phone call to her office weeks after she mentioned an interest in working as a judge on his Miss USA beauty pageant. She says she was shocked by the proposition, which “came out of nowhere”. “‘Donald,’ I responded, ‘I believe we’re both married.’ I quickly ended the call,” she wrote in her book. “This proposition made it difficult for me to report with a straight face on Trump running for president. It infuriated me that he would call all the women who shared stories of his bold advances liars. I totally believe them,” she says.

Fox News reporter says Trump invited her to his office 'so we can kiss' | US news | The Guardian

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On 1 September 1991, a large private yacht cruised towards the Statue of Liberty. It was a clear, breezy evening, and from the upper deck of the Spirit of New York, a golden sunset could be seen glinting off the Manhattan skyline. Downstairs, a party was in flow. Scores of teenage girls in evening dresses and miniskirts, some as young as 14, danced under disco lights. It could have been a high school prom, were it not for the crowd of older men surrounding them. As the evening wore on, some of the men – many old enough to be the girls’ fathers, or even grandfathers – joined them on the dancefloor, pressing themselves against the girls. One balding man in a suit wrapped his arms around two young models, leering into a film camera that was documenting the evening: “Can you get some beautiful women around me, please?”

The party aboard the Spirit of New York was one of several events that Donald Trump, then 45, attended with a group of 58 aspiring young models that September. They had travelled from around the world to compete in Elite’s Look of the Year competition, an annual event that had been running since 1983 and was already credited with launching the careers of Cindy Crawford, Helena Christensen and Stephanie Seymour. At stake was a life-changing prize: a $150,000 contract with the world’s then leading modelling agency, Elite Model Management, run by John Casablancas. Trump was closely involved in Casablancas’s competition. In 1991, he was a headline sponsor, throwing open the Plaza, his lavish, chateau-style hotel overlooking Central Park, transforming it into the main venue and accommodating the young models. He was also one of its 10 judges.

In 1992, Trump hosted the competition again. On a similarly golden evening in early September that year, another group of contestants boarded the Spirit of New York, chartered for another Elite cruise. One of the girls on the boat was Shawna Lee, then a 14-year-old from a small town outside Toronto. She recalls how the contestants were encouraged to parade downstairs, one by one, and dance for Trump, Casablancas and others. Lee, an introverted teenager who loved to draw but hated school, was in New York for the first time. “A woman at the agency was pushing me,” she recalls. “I said to her, ‘I don’t see why me going down the stairs and dancing in front of those two has anything to do with me becoming a model. And she said, ‘No, you look great, take off your blazer and go and do it.’ So I walked down the stairs. I didn’t dance – I blew a kiss at them, spun around and walked away.”

Another contestant, who was 15 at the time, also remembers being asked to walk for Trump, Casablancas and other men on the boat in September 1992. She says an organiser told her that if she refused, she would be excluded from the competition. “I knew in my gut it wasn’t right,” she recalls. “This wasn’t being judged or part of the competition – it was for their entertainment.”

Three decades on, a very different picture of the competition is beginning to emerge. Over the last six months, the Guardian has spoken to several dozen former Look of the Year contestants, as well as industry insiders, and obtained 12 hours of previously unseen, behind-the-scenes footage. The stories we have heard suggest that Casablancas, and some of the men in his orbit, used the contest to engage in sexual relationships with vulnerable young models. Some of these allegations amount to sexual harassment, abuse or exploitation of teenage girls; others are more accurately described as rape.

No such allegations have been levelled against Trump, who at the time was dating Marla Maples, the woman who in 1993 became his second wife. But his close involvement in the contest raises questions for the president. Did he know that Casablancas and others were sleeping with contestants? Why would a man in his 40s, whose main business was real-estate development, want to host a beauty contest for teenage girls?

Journalists have scoured almost every corner of the 45th president’s life, but his friendship with Casablancas, and his involvement in Look of the Year in 1991 and 1992, have been largely overlooked. Yet the competition is more than a footnote in the Donald Trump story. In time, it would prove to be the foundation of his pivot into reality TV. He even married a former Look of the Year contestant: the current first lady, Melania Trump, narrowly missed out on a trip to New York in 1992, after coming second in the Slovenian heat...

At 16, Wilkes was one of the older contestants in Look of the Year. The 1992 Fox documentary reported that the average age was 15, and the film’s interviews make the youth of many contestants plain. Standing before the judges for the key swimwear round, the aspiring models are asked to tell the panel about themselves. “I sing and love animals,” says one girl, nervously. Another tells the judges: “I like big dogs and chocolate.” Later, during a photoshoot, a photographer instructs a 15-year-old to show more of her cleavage by pulling her bra lower. “More,” he tells her. “More. More.”

The contestant who came third in 1991 was Kate Dillon, then 17. Dillon, who went on to become a successful plus-sized model, says that many of her fellow competitors were “from places that were very poor. I came from a family that had means, so it was something fun to do for a week to get out of school – but a lot of these girls were desperate.” She recalls various “after-hours” events over the course of the five-day competition. “It was very clear that there were opportunities to go out and party with Donald,” she says. The contestants were led to believe “that if you were nice to certain people, good things will happen to you, and I think that’s why girls were going out”.

Some former contestants recall him being there as they got dressed for events. “Every time we changed, it was like Trump would find a reason to come backstage,” Wilkes says. A Canadian contestant from 1992 recalls similar incidents. “He’d come by and say, ‘Hey girls, are we ready?’” she says. “I remember thinking, what have I got myself into?” Trump denies, “in the strongest possible terms”, behaving inappropriately with any Look of the Year contestants. His representatives say he was not aware of any predatory environment at the time.

Others, however, observed a disturbing side to the contest. Ohad Oman, a young reporter for a magazine in Tel Aviv, was sent to cover it in 1991 and 1992. He attended a number of the after-parties, and remembers seeing girls drinking alcohol. He recalls one particularly debauched party, telling the Guardian: “I saw girls sitting on guys’ laps, and I remember one guy putting his hand down a girl’s top. I remember thinking they were younger than me, and I was 17 going on 18.” (The legal drinking age is 21 in the US.)

Teen models, powerful men and private dinners: when Trump hosted Look of the Year | US news | The Guardian