Julia Nikhinson/AP
At a press conference at Trump Tower in Manhattan on Friday, former President Donald Trump wanted the world to know he would never have sexually assaulted Jessica Leeds.
"She would not have been the chosen one," he told reporters, implying her appearance wasn't up to his standards.
On Monday, Leeds held a press conference of her own to confront him on that insult. With Trump Tower as her backdrop, she called the GOP presidential candidate "a sexual predator" and said she is deciding whether to sue him.
"He assaulted me 50 years ago and he continues to attack me today," she told a group of reporters gathered on Fifth Avenue. She called Trump's "chosen one" comments "really bizarre."
"I must admit I did laugh," she said of hearing of the remark. "It's a little spooky and a little difficult to process. He does seem to be kind of obsessed. But here I am."
Leeds accuses Trump of groping her while he sat next to her in the first-class cabin on a flight in 1979.
She first publicly aired her accusation in 2016, during the presidential campaign, telling The New York Times that Trump groped her as they sat side by side in the first-class cabin of a New York-bound flight.
Leeds told her story in greatest detail in the spring of 2023, on the witness stand in federal court in Manhattan, as part of the sexual abuse and defamation case brought by the writer E. Jean Carroll.
"He was grabbing my breasts," she testified at Carroll's trial. "It's like he had 40 zillion hands, and it was a tussling match between the two of us."
Leeds, then a businesswoman, saw Trump again about two years later at a charity fundraiser, she testified.
"He said, 'I remember you. You're that cunt from the airplane,'" Leeds told the Carroll jury. "Well, it was like a bucket of cold water had been thrown over my head."
During appellate arguments on Friday, Trump's lawyers claimed that Leeds's testimony should never have been allowed because of the particular jurisdictional laws around airplanes. (The panel of three judges was skeptical.)
Soon after the parties left federal court, Trump summoned reporters to Trump Tower, where he disparaged Leeds, Carroll, and a third accuser and trial witness, Natasha Stoynoff, in a press conference after oral arguments in the appeal of Carroll's case.
AP Photo/Julia Nikhinson
Leeds on Monday gave a brief but no less emphatic version of her story to reporters, saying she was doing so, "because I believe it's important to remind voters."
"All of a sudden, this man started grabbing me and trying to kiss me," she recounted of the plane ride. "He had 47 arms like an octopus."
"When he decided to put his hand up my skirt, that gave me enough energy to move away from him," she added.
At the press conference Monday, Leeds said she first went public with her claims after Trump denied sexually assaulting women during a presidential debate, wanting to set the record straight. She urged people not to vote for Trump in the 2024 election.
"We just cannot allow this person back into the White House," she said Monday.
Carroll's 2023 defamation and sexual abuse jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll, awarding her $5 million in damages. A second jury, in January of this year, ordered Trump to pay an additional $83 million to Carroll for additional defamation claims.
The sexual abuse lawsuit against Trump included only claims from Carroll. But testimony from Leeds and Stoynoff — as well as the infamous "Access Hollywood" tape where Trump brags about grabbing women by the genitals — were permitted as evidence to demonstrate a pattern of behavior from Trump.
Carroll's lawsuit alleged that, in the mid-1990s, Trump cornered her in the dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman — a luxury department store a short walk from Trump Tower — and sexually assaulted her.
She brought her sexual abuse lawsuit under the Adult Survivor's Act, a New York law that briefly opened a window for civil claims that the statute of limitations would otherwise bar.
Carroll also brought defamation claims against Trump after he called her a liar by denying her accusations and insulted her appearance, calling her "not my type."
The incident on the airplane that Leeds describes did not take place in New York and happened decades ago, making it challenging for her to have brought a sexual abuse lawsuit.
But Trump denying her account on Friday may have opened a fresh window for a defamation suit.
"I'm considering a number of options because of his latest remarks," she told reporters Monday. "But no decision has been made."
