After Donald Trump was found liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll on Tuesday, staffers who worked at the White House during his time in office accused him of sexual harassment.
Stephanie Grisham, a former White House press secretary, and Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former White House communications director, have accused Trump of a pattern of behaving inappropriately with women while president.
Their comments came after a Manhattan jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll almost 30 years ago and defaming her when she went public with her allegations. The jury awarded her $5 million in damages. Trump's lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, said the former president planned to appeal.
Grisham and Farah Griffin said they reported Trump's behavior to his chiefs of staff, including Mark Meadows.
Trump was especially fixated on one staffer on her team, Grisham told CNN on Tuesday, adding that she took pains to make sure the woman was never alone with the president "because I was really nervous about what could happen." Grisham does not name the staffer in her book.
She said in the interview that she had described Trump's behavior towards women in her 2021 book, I'll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw at the Trump White House.
In the book, Grisham wrote that she noticed Trump "taking an unusual interest in a young, highly attractive press wrangler" on her team.
While she said she was not alleging that "anything happened" between Trump and the woman, Grisham said her book noted that the former president would ask her where the woman was and whether she would be traveling with him on foreign trips.
"When she did come along on trips, he often asked me to bring her to his office cabin in the aircraft, which he'd rarely done with anyone else," Grisham wrote.
"Sometimes I would make an excuse, but on the occasions where I couldn't find a way out of it, I always accompanied her and stayed in the cabin the whole time."
Grisham wrote that when former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway went to the president to advocate for a staffer who had been let go, the "only thing he wanted to make sure of was that Meadows hadn't fired the other woman, the one he seemed to find so attractive."
Grisham wrote that Trump told her: "Put her on TV. Keep her happy, promote her." On one trip Trump asked one of her deputies to bring the woman to his office cabin so he could ogle her.
"I got a call afterward relaying that the president had said, 'let's bring her up here and look at her ass.' After that, I tried to keep her off trips."
Grisham also detailed uncomfortable encounters she had with Trump. She said that he once asked her then-boyfriend on an Air Force One flight whether she was "good in bed."
The book relates how Trump had insulted Carroll's looks during a rant in the Oval Office before telling Grisham: "You just deny it. That's what you do in every situation. Right, Stephanie? You just deny it."
Newsweek has contacted Trump's office for comment via email and Grisham via Twitter.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Khaleda Rahman is Newsweek's Senior News Reporter based in London, UK. Her focus is reporting on abortion rights, race, education, ... Read more
