WASHINGTON (AP) — Stacey Williams is accusing former President Donald Trump of groping her at Trump Tower in early 1993 as disgraced hedge fund manager Jeffrey Epstein watched.
The former model initially made the allegation on Monday during a video chat of sexual violence survivors supporting Vice President Kamala Harris ' campaign. In an interview Friday with The Associated Press, she described walking down New York City's Fifth Avenue with Epstein, whom she was seeing at the time, when he suggested they visit Trump in his namesake tower.
As soon as Trump saw her, she said, he “had his arms around me and pulled me into him.”
“Then he started groping me. He started rubbing his hands up and down my body. He touched my breasts. He touched my waist. He touched my butt,” she said. “And while his hands are on me, he’s continuing to have a conversation with Jeffrey who is, you know, standing across from us. And I just froze. I was so confused.”
Karoline Leavitt, a Trump spokeswoman, called the allegations “unequivocally false” and argued they were politically motivated.
The organizer of the Survivors for Kamala video call said this week’s meeting was not affiliated with the Harris campaign and was an outside gathering of sexual violence survivors and advocate organizations. The Harris campaign declined Friday to comment on the allegations. And Williams said while she is voting for Harris, she has not had any contact with the Democrat’s campaign or knowingly had contact with people associated with her run.
The allegation is the latest in a lengthy list of accusations made against Trump, including by E. Jean Carroll, who has been locked in a legal battle with the businessman-turned-president after a jury found him liable in 2023 for sexually assaulting the advice columnist in 1996 and later for defaming her. The allegations against Trump go back decades and include those described in the “Access Hollywood” tape, a 2005 video made public weeks before the 2016 election that showed the then-reality television star bragging about grabbing, forcibly kissing and sexually assaulting women.
In the interview, Williams said the encounter with Trump “felt orchestrated," like she got “walked in there for that moment and they both knew exactly what they were doing.”
“I was just like this, you know, thing to be played with over some sort of twisted game or a bet or something,” she added.
At the time of the alleged incident, Trump was in his mid-40s, while Williams was in her mid-20s. Williams said she recalled “an assistant who had walked by a couple of times” and whom she had been introduced to, but the encounter was primarily just her, Trump and Epstein. In total, she said, the encounter lasted around “about five minutes, maybe a little longer, definitely less than 10 minutes. ”
While Epstein was conversational and said nothing to Trump in the moment, Williams recalls his “energy” changing when they got in the elevator to leave.
“He wasn’t making eye contact with me. He seemed like he was seething, like he was really angry,” she said. “And my heart was still pounding and I was still confused.”
When the two got to the street, she said: “The first thing he said was, ‘Why did you let him do that?’ And he berated me. ... Of course, I immediately then felt ashamed."
The two went in different directions after that encounter — “I went downtown, he went uptown,” she said — and it was then that Williams said she really began to absorb what happened.
On the call earlier in the week, Williams added that “not long after” that meeting in Trump Tower she received a postcard from Trump. Williams said her agent received the postcard, via courier, from Trump.
Williams' team provided the AP with images of the postcard. One side is a photo of Palm Beach and Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s resort in Florida, and the other side is writing allegedly from Trump. “Stacey, your home away from home. Love, Donald,” reads the postcard.
Williams said her encounter with Trump was the third — and final — time she had met Trump. The two had met earlier at a Christmas party that the businessman had thrown in 1992, but after their encounter in early 1993, the model had “such an aversion to running into him after that. I never wanted to be around him again, ever.” Williams said she saw Epstein “one or two more times" after the 1993 encounter with Trump.
Although Trump has sought to distance himself from Epstein in recent years, he told New York Magazine in 2002 that he had known “Jeff” for 15 years.
“Terrific guy,” Trump told the magazine. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
The reason Williams says she is coming forward now is because she decided to say in a recently premiered documentary called “Beyond the Gaze” that she was groped by a former president in front of Jeffrey Epstein, according to a person close to Williams who requested anonymity to describe her private thinking. She did not name Trump in the interview, but found out only a few weeks ago that the comment would be included in the documentary, the person said, so Williams thought it was time to speak out because of the attention the comment would likely receive.
Williams said that when the “Access Hollywood” tape came out, she thought, “Finally everyone’s going to find out what a freaky guy this is, that he does stuff like this.”
“I had an urge to sort of tell the story. But, you know, as the mother of a young child, I wasn’t going to bring that into my life,” she said Friday.
When Trump went on to win the election, however, Williams said she was “sickened.”
“It was beyond beyond comprehension ... just like we are in the upside down,” she said.
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks at a Turning Point Action campaign rally, Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2024, in Duluth, Ga. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks at a faith town hall with Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones at Christ Chapel Zebulon, Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2024, in Zebulon, Ga. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
ATLANTA (AP) — Donald Trump would not be the first president to invoke the Insurrection Act, as he has threatened, so that he can send U.S. military forces to Minnesota.
But he'd be the only commander in chief to use the 19th-century law to send troops to quell protests that started because of federal officers the president already has sent to the area — one of whom shot and killed a U.S. citizen.
The law, which allows presidents to use the military domestically, has been invoked on more than two dozen occasions — but rarely since the 20th Century's Civil Rights Movement.
Federal forces typically are called to quell widespread violence that has broken out on the local level — before Washington's involvement and when local authorities ask for help. When presidents acted without local requests, it was usually to enforce the rights of individuals who were being threatened or not protected by state and local governments. A third scenario is an outright insurrection — like the Confederacy during the Civil War.
Experts in constitutional and military law say none of that clearly applies in Minneapolis.
“This would be a flagrant abuse of the Insurrection Act in a way that we've never seen,” said Joseph Nunn, an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice's Liberty and National Security Program. “None of the criteria have been met.”
William Banks, a Syracuse University professor emeritus who has written extensively on the domestic use of the military, said the situation is “a historical outlier” because the violence Trump wants to end “is being created by the federal civilian officers” he sent there.
But he also cautioned Minnesota officials would have “a tough argument to win” in court, because the judiciary is hesitant to challenge “because the courts are typically going to defer to the president” on his military decisions.
Here is a look at the law, how it's been used and comparisons to Minneapolis.
George Washington signed the first version in 1792, authorizing him to mobilize state militias — National Guard forerunners — when “laws of the United States shall be opposed, or the execution thereof obstructed.”
He and John Adams used it to quash citizen uprisings against taxes, including liquor levies and property taxes that were deemed essential to the young republic's survival.
Congress expanded the law in 1807, restating presidential authority to counter “insurrection or obstruction” of laws. Nunn said the early statutes recognized a fundamental “Anglo-American tradition against military intervention in civilian affairs” except “as a tool of last resort.”
The president argues Minnesota officials and citizens are impeding U.S. law by protesting his agenda and the presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and Customs and Border Protection officers. Yet early statutes also defined circumstances for the law as unrest “too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course” of law enforcement.
There are between 2,000 and 3,000 federal authorities in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, compared to Minneapolis, which has fewer than 600 police officers. Protesters' and bystanders' video, meanwhile, has shown violence initiated by federal officers, with the interactions growing more frequent since Renee Good was shot three times and killed.
“ICE has the legal authority to enforce federal immigration laws,” Nunn said. “But what they're doing is a sort of lawless, violent behavior” that goes beyond their legal function and “foments the situation” Trump wants to suppress.
“They can't intentionally create a crisis, then turn around to do a crackdown,” he said, adding that the Constitutional requirement for a president to “faithfully execute the laws” means Trump must wield his power, on immigration and the Insurrection Act, “in good faith.”
Courts have blocked some of Trump's efforts to deploy the National Guard, but he'd argue with the Insurrection Act that he does not need a state's permission to send troops.
That traces to President Abraham Lincoln, who held in 1861 that Southern states could not legitimately secede. So, he convinced Congress to give him express power to deploy U.S. troops, without asking, into Confederate states he contended were still in the Union. Quite literally, Lincoln used the act as a legal basis to fight the Civil War.
Nunn said situations beyond such a clear insurrection as the Confederacy still require a local request or another trigger that Congress added after the Civil War: protecting individual rights. Ulysses S. Grant used that provision to send troops to counter the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists who ignored the 14th and 15th amendments and civil rights statutes.
During post-war industrialization, violence erupted around strikes and expanding immigration — and governors sought help.
President Rutherford B. Hayes granted state requests during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 after striking workers, state forces and local police clashed, leading to dozens of deaths. Grover Cleveland granted a Washington state governor's request — at that time it was a U.S. territory — to help protect Chinese citizens who were being attacked by white rioters. President Woodrow Wilson sent troops to Colorado in 1914 amid a coal strike after workers were killed.
Federal troops helped diffuse each situation.
Banks stressed that the law then and now presumes that federal resources are needed only when state and local authorities are overwhelmed — and Minnesota leaders say their cities would be stable and safe if Trump's feds left.
As Grant had done, mid-20th century presidents used the act to counter white supremacists.
Franklin Roosevelt dispatched 6,000 troops to Detroit — more than double the U.S. forces in Minneapolis — after race riots that started with whites attacking Black residents. State officials asked for FDR's aid after riots escalated, in part, Nunn said, because white local law enforcement joined in violence against Black residents. Federal troops calmed the city after dozens of deaths, including 17 Black residents killed by local police.
Once the Civil Rights Movement began, presidents sent authorities to Southern states without requests or permission, because local authorities defied U.S. civil rights law and fomented violence themselves.
Dwight Eisenhower enforced integration at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas; John F. Kennedy sent troops to the University of Mississippi after riots over James Meredith's admission and then pre-emptively to ensure no violence upon George Wallace's “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door” to protest the University of Alabama's integration.
“There could have been significant loss of life from the rioters” in Mississippi, Nunn said.
Lyndon Johnson protected the 1965 Voting Rights March from Selma to Montgomery after Wallace's troopers attacked marchers' on their first peaceful attempt.
Johnson also sent troops to multiple U.S. cities in 1967 and 1968 after clashes between residents and police escalated. The same thing happened in Los Angeles in 1992, the last time the Insurrection Act was invoked.
Riots erupted after a jury failed to convict four white police officers of excessive use of force despite video showing them beating a Rodney King, a Black man. California Gov. Pete Wilson asked President George H.W. Bush for support.
Bush authorized about 4,000 troops — but after he had publicly expressed displeasure over the trial verdict. He promised to “restore order” yet directed the Justice Department to open a civil rights investigation, and two of the L.A. officers were later convicted in federal court.
President Donald Trump answers questions after signing a bill that returns whole milk to school cafeterias across the country, in the Oval Office of the White House, Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
