President Donald Trump’s brazen narcissism and gross corruption seem to know few, if any bounds. Now, a former Fox News reporter named Courtney Friel has revealed that apparently, in the years before he ran for president, Trump invited Friel to Trump Tower “to kiss,” although at the time, both of them were married. The story fits into a long pattern of women who have shared their stories of advances and assault from Trump, all of which the president and his allies have strenuously and often belligerently denied, no matter the credibility of the claims.
In this case, Friel apparently worked for six years at Fox including a role as a substitute anchor for the network’s morning show Fox & Friends, which Trump has long established as one of his favorite programs. He’s tweeted about it many, many times.
In her new memoir Tonight At 10: Kicking Booze and Breaking News, Friel — who now works for an L.A.-area news station — shares that during a 2010 phone conversation in which they’d previously been discussing her expressed interest in serving as a judge at his Miss USA beauty pageant, the eventual president jumped right into calling her “the hottest one” at the network.
She explains:
‘Though he said I couldn’t be a judge since I worked at a different network, he did ask me about my career goals and complimented my work at FNC. Then, out of nowhere, he said: ‘You should come up to my office sometime, so we can kiss.’.. 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.’
Although he may have expected that his brazen, violating vulgarity would never see the light of day, here we are. Around two dozen women have accused Trump of various forms of sexual assault at this point. Presently, at least two of them have open court cases against him. Author E. Jean Carroll and businesswoman Summer Zervos, who was once a contestant on Trump’s reality television show The Apprentice, are both suing Trump for defamation over his belligerent, belittling responses to their accusations. Most recently, the Trump team filed a motion requesting dismissal of Carroll’s case over a supposed lack of jurisdiction, while the Zervos case has an open discovery and deposition period ongoing ahead of a looming trial.
The president and his allies’ responses to the accusations against him have always been vitriolic. Trump has even mocked the appearance of some of his accusers, thereby engaging in exactly the kind of outlandish sexism that supports the idea that he’d engage in behavior like that which he’s accused of doing.
That’s in addition to the evidence for his violent sexism like the unearthed 2005 Access Hollywood tape on which he can be heard bragging about committing sexual assault, which he dismissed as just “locker room talk.” In reality, Trump’s presidency is continuing to serve as a standard-bearer for those interested in perpetuating violent marginalization of Americans.
