Trump Voters Do Not Care If He Groped A Model While Palling Around With Epstein
She still deserves to be heard.
By now, you have probably heard Stacey Williams’s story.
Williams, a former Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, was at Trump Tower in 1993 with Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, whom she went on a few dates with around that time. The two men had a conversation and, during this, Trump went on about his merry way, groping her as if that were a normal thing to do to another human being.
She’s told friends for years, alluded to it on social media at least as far back as 2020, and came forward entirely in Beyond The Gaze, a yet-to-be-released documentary about Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition editor Jule Campbell, as well as in a recent call with Kamala Harris supporters.
Via Washington Post:
“He put his hands all over my breasts,” she said, pausing for a moment as she choked up, in a video of the call provided to The Post. “My waist. My butt. […] The hands were moving all over me, yet these two men were, like, smiling at one another and continuing on in their conversation.”
She said Epstein, whom she was casually dating at the time, berated her after they left the office because she “let” Trump touch her. As the humiliation set in, she said, she believed that the encounter was “some sort of sick bet … or twisted game” planned by the two men to degrade her.
Williams has also taken a polygraph about the incident, the results of which were “not indicative of deception.”
The Trump campaign, naturally, is denying the charges — just as they have done with the 87,000 other accusations against him.
Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted that Williams’s story was “unequivocally false” and planted by the Harris campaign in order to attack him, noting that she did donate $25 to Joe Biden and $425 to the Obama campaign in 2008.
“It’s obvious this fake story was contrived by the Harris campaign,” Leavitt said, as if she even needed to bother.
Honestly, at this point, when Trumpists claim that a sexual assault accusation against him isn’t true, it really just feels like they are actually delusional enough to believe that we think highly enough of them that we believe they’d care. They’re flattering themselves, really.
Trump himself bragged about how he grabbed women by the pussy, and they still voted for him. In fact, I still maintain that he won because of, not in spite of, the Access Hollywood Tape. People — and I include the kind of women who would vote for Trump in this — wanted to see certain kinds of women “put in their place.” Just as Trump felt that “grabbing them by the pussy” was a power move for him, they saw electing him president as a power move for them.
Some people might think that with all their obsessing over “sex trafficking,” the Jeffrey Epstein thing would bother them, but the only “sex trafficking” they care about is the especially cinematic and imaginary kind. The kind that involves dramatic capes and tunnels and making shoes out of baby leather and grossly misunderstanding art.
That being said.
Stacey Williams deserves to be heard, regardless of the impact it has on the election, because every survivor deserves that. We need to listen, because we need to really absorb the fact that the man that did that to her, ever so casually, is the man that nearly half of the country wants to be president again. It’s important to know who people are.
The fact is, the more they continue to support him through things like this, through all of the “Hey, you know who wasn’t a bad guy? Hitler!” and through everything else, their support for him doesn’t get eroded, it gets cemented. They become more loyal to him. There is no one more fiercely loyal and dedicated than the person who is defending an obvious monster because of who they are.
If your assessment of someone’s guilt or innocence is based on the available evidence, you’re just not going to be as het up as someone who believes in someone’s guilt or innocence because “vibes” or because they like or dislike them. Because your mind can be changed with further evidence. I don’t think Donald Trump is guilty just because I dislike him as a person, but because there are 87,000 reports of him doing this to women, one of which came directly from his own mouth, and because Williams said it multiple times to multiple people and passed a lie detector test. If there were evidence to the contrary, I wouldn’t think twice about changing my mind — not least of all because there are also 87,000 other entirely valid reasons to fear another four years of Trump.
It would be lovely if we could still think to ourselves “Oh boy, he’s really crossing a line now!” with regards to these things, but that’s not going to happen. There are no lines left to cross for these people — at this point, we just have to hope that we outnumber them.
Yes, I completely agree. Every time we collectively say "oh well, this allegation of abuse won't move Trump's support, why bother?" we are not fully acknowledging the trauma of a very brave woman who came forward to share her painful story, despite the blowback that you just know she's going to have to endure. It matters, and we should continue to be outraged. And we should absolutely shame the assholes that don't care and are still voting for this rapist.
The Washington Post refuses to endorse a Presidential candidate. Bezos doesn’t want to endanger his sweet government contracts. And I’m in no condition to drink. This is the worst timeline.