Photo by Gage Skidmore/via Wikimedia Commons
Read: What Would Happen if Donald Trump Actually Became President?During Ivana Trump's messy divorce from her ex-husband in the early 90s, the blond model and former athlete found herself in a room full of lawyers, listing as many reasons she could think of to justify ending her marriage with Donald Trump. As the deposition dragged on, she began to describe a brutal sexual encounter between the two in 1989, using the word "rape" to characterize what he did to her, the Daily Beast reported Monday.Later, she would issue a statement clarifying that she "felt violated" by the experience, but not in the "criminal sense."But on Monday, Michael Cohen—special counsel to the Trump organization and one of the candidate's advisers—denied the business mogul ever sexually abused his ex-wife. He also threatened the reporter asking about the incident with a lawsuit, promising that what he'd do to the journalist—should they dare publish a story about it—would be "fucking disgusting.""You're talking about the frontrunner for the GOP, presidential candidate, as well as a private individual who never raped anybody," Cohen told the Daily Beast . "And, of course, understand that by the very definition, you can't rape your spouse."As the Beast wrote, "That is not true. In New York, there used to be a so-called marital rape exemption to the law. It was struck down in 1984."Former Newsweek reporter Harry Hurt III first shed light on Ivana Trump's deposition, and the incident between Trump and his ex-wife, in his 1993 book Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump. The scene he describes is, to say the least, really fucked up.One night in 1989, according to Hurt's book, Trump had just gone through a nasty scalp-reduction surgery to get rid of a bald spot on his head. He then began to yell at Ivana, who months earlier had visited the same plastic surgeon."Your fucking doctor has ruined me!" Trump reportedly screamed.He then held back Ivana's arms, ripping chunks of hair out of her scalp in what seemed like a twisted effort to mimic his own pain. He subsequently pulled down his pants and tore off Ivana's clothes, according to the book."Then he jams his penis inside her for the first time in more than 16 months. Ivana is terrified… It is a violent assault," Hurt wrote. "According to versions she repeats to some of her closest confidantes, 'He raped me.'"After the "violent assault" was finally over, Ivana ran upstairs and locked herself in a room, crying there "for the rest of the night." When she came back into the master bedroom the next morning, Trump was still there."As she looks in horror at the ripped-out hair scattered all over the bed, he glares at her and asks with menacing casualness: 'Does it hurt?'" Hurt wrote.Trump has publicly denied the allegation for decades, and in Lost Tycoon even denied having the scalp surgery. Ivana also released a statement around the time Lost Tycoon was released claiming she didn't want her earlier reference to a "rape" to be "interpreted in a literal or criminal sense." (On Tuesday, she released another statement to CNN saying the Daily Beast story was "totally without merit," and Cohen apologized for making "an inarticulate comment—which I do not believe.")Trump has been saying horrible things about sexual assault for a long time now. In 1992, he suggested that the courts should allow convicted rapist Mike Tyson to pay "millions and millions of dollars" to his victims instead of serving jail time. In 2013, he blamed high rates of rape in the military on the fact that women are allowed to serve alongside men. And when he announced he'd be running for president just last month, Trump accused Mexican immigrants of being "rapists" who bring crime to the country.Trump's history of nasty remarks doesn't seem to be hurting him, however. Despite his recent suggestion that John McCain, a prisoner of war for more than five years, isn't a war hero—the Donald is still at the top of a New Hampshire poll released today.
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