On an April 11, 2005, airing of The Howard Stern Show, Donald Trump bragged about some of the special perks he enjoyed while he was owner of the Miss USA pageant. They came not in a locker room but a dressing room.
"I'll go backstage before a show, and everyone's getting dressed and ready and everything else," he said.
"And you know, no men are anywhere. And I'm allowed to go in because I'm the owner of the pageant. And therefore I'm inspecting it."
Stern replied, "You're like a doctor."
Trump responded: "Is everyone okay? You know they're standing there with no clothes. And you see these incredible-looking women. And so I sort of get away with things like that."
CNN broke the story of his Stern show comments.
CBS 2 Los Angeles did a little fact-checking and, guess what, this time, no Pinocchios. Tasha Dixon, Miss Arizona in 2001, told the TV station that Trump just came "waltzing in" while contestants were nude or half-nude as they changed into bikinis.
Separately, BuzzFeed News reported today that four women in the 1997 Miss Teen USA beauty pageant said Trump walked into their dressing room while they were changing. Some were as young as 15, BuzzFeed reported.
Three spoke anonymously, and one allowed her name to be used. "I remember putting on my dress really quick because I was like, 'Oh my god, there's a man in here,'" Mariah Billado, a former Miss Vermont Teen USA, told BuzzFeed.
Trump, she told BuzzFeed News, said "something like 'Don't worry, ladies, I've seen it all before'."
The Trump campaign, BuzzFeed News said, did not respond to requests for comment. And BuzzFeed reported that 11 more women who had been contestants in the 1997 Miss Teen USA pageant said they "did not recall seeing Trump in the dressing room. Some said they do not believe he could have been there".
As for Tasha Dixon, she only confirmed what Trump told Howard Stern, except with detail. She described to the Los Angeles TV station her experience with Trump as a contestant in 2001 in a dressing room where she and others were changing into bikinis:
"He just came strolling right in. There was no second to put a robe on or any sort of clothing or anything. Some girls were topless. Others girls were naked.
Ah.
— Ariel Kaminer (@arielkaminer) October 12, 2016
Well.
Seems Trump used to walk in on his *teenage* beauty contests while they were getting dressed, too. https://t.co/v5ghZsehp6
"Our first introduction to him was when we were at the dress rehearsal and half naked changing into our bikinis.
"To have the owner come waltzing in, when we're naked, or half naked, in a very physically vulnerable position and then to have the pressure of the people that worked for him telling us to go fawn all over him, go walk up to him, talk to him, get his attention."
She suggested that such opportunities were among the reasons Trump owned beauty pageants.
"I'm telling you Donald Trump owned the pageant for the reasons to utilise his power to get around beautiful women. Who do you complain to? He owns the pageant. There's no one to complain to. Everyone there works for him."
The former Miss Teen USA contestant, Billado, told BuzzFeed News she saw Trump's intrusion as "more of a pompous 'I own this place' rather than a perverted thing".