The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

Trump's accuser plans to keep talking about that day in 2006

’Is anybody listening?’ wonders Rachel Crooks

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February 23, 2018 at 3:14 p.m. EST

Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Eli Saslow.

Rachel Crooks was used to difficult audiences, to skeptics and Internet trolls who flooded her Facebook page with threats, but this was a generous crowd: a dozen women, all friends of her aunt, gathered for a casual dinner party on a Friday night. The hostess turned off the music, clanked a fork against her wineglass and gestured to Crooks. “Would you mind telling us about the famous incident?” she asked. “Not the sound-bite version, but the real version.”

“The real version,” Crooks said, nodding back. She took a sip of water and folded a napkin onto her lap.

“It all happened at Trump Tower,” she said. “I had just moved to New York, and I was working as a secretary for another company in the building. That’s where he forced himself on me.”

Rachel Crooks, who accused Trump of sexual harassment, is running for office in Ohio

Crooks, 35, had been publicly reliving this story for much of the past two years, ever since she first described it in an email to the New York Times several months before the 2016 election. “I don’t know if people will really care about this or if this will matter at all,” she had written then, and after Donald Trump’s election she had repeated her story at the Women’s March, on the “Today” show and at a news conference organized by women’s rights attorney Gloria Allred. Crooks had spoken to people dressed in #MeToo sweatshirts and to her rural neighbors whose yards were decorated with Trump signs. In early February, she launched a campaign to become a Democratic state representative in Ohio, in part so she could share her story more widely with voters across the state. And yet, after dozens of retellings, she still wasn’t sure: Did people really care? Did it matter at all?

Despite her story, and the similar stories of more than a dozen other women, nothing had changed. Trump, who had denied all of the accusations, was still president of the United States, and Crooks was still circling back to the same moments on Jan. 11, 2006, that had come to define so much about her life.

“He was waiting for the elevator outside our office when I got up the nerve to introduce myself,” she said now, remembering that day when she was 22 years old and Trump was 59. “It’s not like I was trying to upset the apple cart. I don’t know. Maybe I was being naive.”

The hostess shook her head and then reached for Crooks’s hand. “You did absolutely nothing wrong,” she said.

“Thank you,” Crooks said, even though she sometimes still wondered. She reached for her water glass and lifted it up into the air to use as a prop. “He took hold of my hand and held me in place like this,” she said, squeezing the sides of the water glass, shaking it gently from side to side. “He started kissing me on one cheek, then the other cheek. He was talking to me in between kisses, asking where I was from, or if I wanted to be a model. He wouldn’t let go of my hand, and then he went right in and started kissing me on the lips.”

She shook the water glass one final time and set it down. “It felt like a long kiss,” she said. “The whole thing probably lasted two minutes, maybe less.”

“Like you were another piece of his property,” the hostess said.

“And with those orange lips!” another woman said.

“The Nineteen”

There were 19 women in all who made public accusations of sexual misconduct, or “The Nineteen,” as they had come to be known on T-shirts and bumper stickers. Most had come forward with their stories after Trump launched his presidential campaign in 2015, and the experiences they described having with him spanned five decades. They claimed Trump had “acted like a creepy uncle,” or “squeezed my butt,” or “eyed me like meat,” or “stuck his hand up under my skirt,” or “groped with octopus hands,” or “pushed me against a wall,” or “thrust his genitals,” or “forced his tongue into my mouth” or “offered $10,000 for everything.”

In response, Trump had called the accusations against him “total fabrications” based on “political motives” to destroy his campaign and then his presidency. “Nothing ever happened with any of these women,” Trump tweeted once. “Totally made up nonsense to steal the election. Nobody has more respect for women than me!”

One woman accused Trump of assaulting her in the middle of a commercial flight after they met as seatmates in the 1970s. Another said it happened in a conference room during the middle of a job interview. Another, a journalist for People magazine, said Trump forced his tongue into her mouth as they finished an interview for a feature story about his marriage to Melania. The list of accusers included a reality-TV host, a runner-up on “The Apprentice,” a yoga instructor, an adult-film star and several women who had competed in Trump’s beauty pageants: a Miss New Hampshire, Miss Washington, Miss Arizona and Miss Finland.

Rachel Crooks

And then there was Crooks, who had never been on reality TV, never drank alcohol, never met anyone famous until she moved from her childhood home in Green Springs to New York City in the summer of 2005. Nobody else in three generations of her family had ever seen the appeal in leaving Green Springs, population 1,300, but nobody else was quite like her: striking and self-assured at 6 feet tall; all-state in basketball, volleyball and track; the high school salutatorian and “Most Likely to Succeed.” She wanted to backpack across Europe, earn her doctorate, work in high-end fashion and live in a skyscraper that looked out over something other than an endless grid of brown-and-green soybean fields. “New York is where you can make things happen,” she had written to a friend back then, and a few weeks after graduating from college she persuaded her high school boyfriend, Clint Hackenburg, to move with her.

The Trump accuser who refuses to go away

They rented a room in a cheap group house way out in Bay Ridge, and she took the first job she could find on Craigslist to pay rent, at an investment firm in Trump Tower called Bayrock. Her secretarial tasks were to make coffee, water the two office palm trees, polish the gold-trimmed mirrors, straighten the tassels on the Oriental rug at the entryway and sit at a mahogany welcome desk to greet visitors who came through the glass front doors.

She found the work mindless and demeaning, but all around her was the promise of New York. Life was fine until that dreaded kiss with Trump, who became the second man to ever kiss her.

Evidence

During one news conference, she had asked Trump to release the security videotapes from the 24th floor that day, but he never responded. She had not heard from him, or anyone representing him, since she came home from New York. “What can I ever do to prove this happened and that it impacted my life?” she said.

Maybe the proof was the email she had sent to her mother, from the Bayrock office in New York, at 1:27 that afternoon in 2006: “Hey Ma, my day started off rough…had a weird incident with Mr. Trump.”

Or the email she sent a few hours later to her sister at 3:05 p.m.: “I must just appear to be some dumb girl that he can take advantage of…ugh!”

Or the email she sent a few days after that to another relative: “Ah yes, the Donald kiss…very creepy man, let me tell you!”

Or the recorded conversation between Trump and Billy Bush on an “Access Hollywood” bus late in 2005, months before Crooks says she met Trump by the elevators: “You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful women. I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”

Life in Ohio

Ten months after moving to New York, she was on her way back to rural Ohio — the place she had never imagined living, and the place she had remained ever since.

She didn’t think of it as a tragedy. She had gone on to graduate school in Ohio, bought a home close to her family, in the nearby town of Tiffin, and begun a career that allowed to her travel around the world, but she also believed some small part of her had never come back from New York. “It was one of the first real failures or defeats of my life, where the world wasn’t what I hoped it was going to be, and I started to really doubt myself,” she said.

For several years she had barely told anybody about Trump, because she assumed nothing would come of her story. Now she had spent 18 months repeating it and proving herself right.

“I am not sure I’ve changed one person’s mind,” she said.

But what choice did she have, except to let it go silent as if it never happened at all? She didn’t want to retreat anymore from that moment, to cycle back into self-doubt. So she would go on television. She would speak at the news conferences. She would deal with the hate mail. She would run for office. She would repeat her story over and over whenever she was asked, even now, to a few women in Columbus marching alongside her in the snow.

“It happened right by the elevators,” she said, beginning the story again, even if she was telling it mostly for herself.