"It was like he claimed me - that's how it felt," said Amy Dorris, who was a model and aspiring actress when she was introduced to Donald J. Trump. Photo / Eve Edelheit, The New York Times
Amy Dorris recently went public with accusations that Donald J. Trump assaulted her at the US Open that year. Two friends say she told them the same story shortly after she attended the event.
Three weeks ago, a news story caught the attention of Dawn Capp, a Texas math teacher. A former model had accused President Donald Trump of assault, the latest in a long line of sexual misconduct complaints against him. At the US Open tennis tournament in 1997, the woman told The Guardian, he groped and forcibly kissed her.
Capp voted for Trump in 2016. But she immediately believed the story, she said in a telephone interview, because she had heard it more than two decades ago from Amy Dorris, the woman making the allegation and one of Capp's oldest friends.
The Trump campaign has called Dorris's account "totally false."
"This is just another pathetic attempt to attack President Trump right before the election," Jenna Ellis, a legal adviser to the Trump campaign, said in a statement.
In phone interviews, Dorris recounted meeting Trump during a strange, star-filled long weekend nearly a quarter-century ago. At the time, she was 24 years old, a Florida-based model and aspiring actress who was also working as a bartender to make rent. One night in Miami, she met Jason Binn, who was just a few years older but already had a magazine and a network of celebrity friends. After they had dated for two weeks, he whisked her off to New York.
The days were a blur of splashy events and celebrity encounters. Dorris met actor Leonardo DiCaprio and attended a memorial for fashion designer Gianni Versace. Binn and Trump, then 51, seemed especially close. But as the new couple spent time with the real estate developer in his box at the US Open, at Trump Tower and in limousines, he wouldn't leave her alone, she said. He told her to picture herself living with him in Trump Tower. He tried to impress her with Trump-branded water and other gear. His hands wandered repeatedly to her waist and her legs, she said.
"It was like he claimed me — that's how it felt," she said.
On a Friday afternoon, he crossed a more serious physical line, Dorris said. During the tennis matches, Dorris excused herself to use a bathroom behind the box's private seating area. When she emerged, Trump was waiting. He told her that she belonged with him and moved toward her, she said.
"It started as him trying to kiss me," Dorris said.
She said she had told him to stop, first with giggles, and then in a more serious tone. He had "a tiger grip — he wasn't letting me go," she said. Trump was shoving his tongue into her mouth, she said.
"I couldn't get loose from him," she said. "His hands were all over me."
As she extracted herself, she pushed against his chest in protest, she said.
She returned to her seat, embarrassed, and pretended nothing had happened, but soon phoned her mother and a friend for counsel. (In phone interviews, both confirmed Dorris's account of the calls.) Dorris said she had asked Binn for help in fending off Trump, but she doubts that she told him about the specifics of the encounter.
"I didn't process what was going on," she said. "I don't think I even understood it."
The next day, as she and Binn sat with Trump in a limousine, her new boyfriend told the future president to back off from making advances to her, she said. Trump replied by laughing and telling Binn that Dorris was out of his league, she said.
Capp, the math teacher, said that soon afterward, her friend had told her the same story about Trump that she later told publicly. Kerri Whitfield, another friend, echoed those recollections, saying that Dorris had shared the story privately in the autumn of 1997. Neither friend has previously spoken publicly; both say they are confident of Dorris's truthfulness.
Binn said that while he remembered the weekend, he had no recollection of Trump's making any advances toward Dorris. The publication of the Guardian article was the "first time I heard or saw anything," he said in a phone interview.
Over the years, Dorris held on to traces of that weekend: ticket stubs, photographs of her with Trump. She encountered Trump a few times, once at Mar-a-Lago, but moved on with her life, taking small acting roles, working in marketing and rearing twin daughters.
In 2016, other women began to publicly tell stories about Trump, some of them similar to hers. The disclosure of the Access Hollywood tape, which captured Trump making crude remarks about sexually assaulting women, provoked widespread outrage, and recognition among Dorris and the friends in whom she had confided.
But she stayed silent then, she said, in part out of fear that her daughters could face a backlash, and because her husband was reluctant.
After more than a year of speaking privately with The Guardian, Dorris said, she decided to share her account. She is in the process of getting divorced, making her husband's reservations less of a factor. She hopes to feel relief in going public. A registered independent who once served as a campaign volunteer for Jeb Bush, the Republican former Florida governor, she said she wanted to speak out about Trump's character.
"It's the person, not the party," she said. "This man should not be the president."
Written by: Jodi Kantor
Photographs by: Eve Edelheit
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