A woman named Alva Johnson is alleging in a lawsuit that President Donald Trump kissed her without her consent during his 2016 campaign. She says the incident took place in August at a Florida rally, when Trump grabbed her by the hand and leaned in to kiss her on the lips. Johnson says she turned her head and the kiss landed on the side of her mouth.
“I immediately felt violated because I wasn’t expecting it or wanting it,” she told The Washington Post. “I can still see his lips coming straight for my face.” The White House denies the claims.
The Post was able to confirm that Johnson told three people about the incident later that day, and consulted a lawyer and a therapist about it two months later. The attorney said he declined to take the case, but provided The Post with text messages showing that he had considered her “credible.” The therapist also confirmed that Johnson had spoken to her about an event during the campaign that left her “distraught,” but hadn’t specified what it was.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told The Post that “This never happened and is directly contradicted by multiple highly credible eye witness accounts,” in a statement. Johnson said two Trump supporters — a campaign official and Pam Bondi, then the Florida attorney general — both witnessed the incident. They denied it to The Post.
Johnson joins more than a dozen other women who have accused Trump of inappropriate sexual contact, but she is the first to do so since he took office. “I’ve tried to let it go,” she told The Post. “You want to move on with your life. I don’t sleep. I wake up at four in the morning looking at the news. I feel guilty. The only thing I did was show up for work one day.”
Johnson said she first began to consider coming forward with her story a few months later in October, when the infamous Access Hollywood tape leaked. “You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them,” Trump said on the 2005 tape. “It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”
“I felt sick to my stomach,” Johnson told The Post. “That was what he did to me.”
