A few days before President Trump heads to the U.K. to meet the queen and the prime minister, a BBC investigative program has revealed fresh allegations of sexually inappropriate actions by Trump during the 1980s and 1990s, comparing him to a “predator” at parties with girls as young as 14.
The report featured Monday on the BBC Panorama investigative documentary series, entitled “Trump: Is the president a sex pest?” included testimony from two women who said they encountered Trump at parties during his time as a real estate magnate and operator of beauty pageants.
Trump’s behavior toward younger women was described by a man who attended the same parties as like that of a “predator.”
One of the women, Barbara Pilling, said she met Trump at a party in New York in the late 1980s while she was a young model. She alleged that then-businessman Trump asked her how old she was and approved when she said she was 17, allegedly responding: “Oh, great. So you're not too old and not too young. That's just great.”
Pilling said she was not the youngest girl at the party, claiming there were girls as young as 14 attending. “I felt I was in the presence of a shark,” Pilling said, describing Trump.
Another woman, Heather Braden, told Panorama that she saw Trump at a party in Miami in the 1990s attended by only four men and 50 female models.
“I felt like a piece of meat in a market,” Braden said. “I could have been auctioned off in some sort of a sex slave ring.”
One anonymous male source speaking to the show claimed to have been at many of the same events as Trump during the same time frame and described drug- and alcohol-fueled parties attended by older men and younger women.
“These were guys who could easily be [the models'] fathers — two times over. [It was] kind of like a feeding frenzy,” he said.
Trump, in particular, was “notorious” for his behavior toward younger women, the man said.
“This guy was like a predator in action. The next day or days after we would hear about it, he would brag about it to his friends and it would get around that he scored. Maybe one or two girls at a time, which is what he loved to do.”
Neither Trump nor the White House has responded to the accusations in the report. In the past, Trump has said he has “no idea” of who any of his accusers are, saying the events never happened and said the women were politically motivated to come forward.
As well as the news accounts from Braden and Piling, Panorama spoke to a number of the other people who have previously accused Trump of inappropriate behavior toward them.
Trump is in for more controversy when he visits the U.K. to meet with under-fire Prime Minister Theresa May later this week, as up to 200,000 people are planning to protest his presence in the country in what activists are calling a “Carnival of Resistance” on Friday.
Accusations of inappropriate behavior are nothing new for Trump. An October 2016 BuzzFeed story said four young contestants in the 1997 Miss Teen USA beauty pageant said Trump walked into the dressing room while they were changing. And since the infamous "Access Hollywood" tape came out a few weeks before the 2016 election, with Trump bragging he could “grab ‘em by the pussy,” more than 20 women have come forward with allegations about interactions with the president. One of them, Summer Zervos, a former contestant on the Trump-hosted reality show “The Apprentice,” is suing Trump for defamation after he denied allegations he forced himself on her in the Beverly Hills Hotel in 2007.
