Donald Trump goes on the offensive. | AP Photo Trump blasts new NYT, People sexual harassment allegations as fabrications

Donald Trump decried as “phony” on Thursday the New York Times story published a day earlier, detailing two separate allegations of sexual assault against the Manhattan billionaire. And then, moments later, he tweeted a denial to a People Magazine story detailing a similar alleged sexual harassment incident from one of its writers.

“The phoney [sic] story in the failing @nytimes is a TOTAL FABRICATION. Written by same people as last discredited story on woman. WATCH!” Trump wrote on Twitter Thursday morning.


The Times published a report on Wednesday detailing two new accusations of sexual assault against Trump, both of which are alleged to have occurred before his foray into presidential politics. In one allegation, a woman said Trump groped her breasts and attempted to put his hand up her skirt in the early 1980s in the first class cabin of a flight to New York.

In the other, a woman who was a receptionist in Trump Tower in 2005 accused the real estate mogul of forcibly kissing her on the cheeks and mouth outside of an elevator. That accusation bears a striking resemblance to Trump’s description of his own behavior on a 2005 recording, when he told Access Hollywood’s Bill Bush that “You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.”

Both women said they felt compelled to make their accusations public in the wake of Trump’s statement at Sunday night’s debate that he had never actually carried out the actions he described to Bush. Other Trump surrogates have suggested that the Times report, as well as two other allegations of sexual assault that surfaced Wednesday, are politically motivated.

Trump followed his post slamming the New York Times with another, this one attacking People magazine writer Natasha Stoynoff, who wrote on Wednesday that Trump had forcibly kissed her in 2005. The reporter said that she had traveled to Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida to interview the Manhattan billionaire about his recent marriage to Melania Trump, but said that as soon as she was alone with him, Trump pinned Stoynoff against the wall and kissed her.

Donald Trump said that the incident Stoynoff described never occurred because if it had, it would have appeared in her original report about the Trumps' marriage.

"Why didn't the writer of the twelve year old article in People Magazine mention the 'incident' in her story. Because it did not happen!" he wrote on Twitter.

Trump’s senior communications adviser Jason Miller called the Times report “fiction” in a statement released Wednesday night, labeling it “a completely false, coordinated character assassination against Mr. Trump.”

“To reach back decades in an attempt to smear Mr. Trump trivializes sexual assault, and it sets a new low for where the media is willing to go in its efforts to determine this election,” Miller said. “It is absurd to think that one of the most recognizable business leaders on the planet with a strong record of empowering women in his companies would do the things alleged in this story, and for this to only become public decades later in the final month of a campaign for president should say it all.”

A spokeswoman for Trump last night also called Stoynoff's accusations "fabricated."