Big hand problems: Donald Trump. Credit:AP She claimed that, when she resisted, Trump tried to lead her to a bedroom, saying: "Let's lay down and watch some telly-telly." She responded: "C'mon man, get real." To which he replied, "Get real," as he thrust his genitals at her. Kristin Anderson, then an aspiring, 20-something model, told The Washington Post of an evening at a Manhattan night spot early in the 1990s. She was seated on a red velvet couch, chatting with acquaintances when she felt a hand slide under her miniskirt, fingers moving up her inner thigh, and touching her vagina through her underwear. Shoving the hand away, she leapt from the couch and, on turning around, recognised her assailant as Trump, who was not a member of her party. "He was so distinctive looking, with the hair and the eyebrows. I mean, nobody else has those eyebrows." And in the way that stories like these, from a dozen or more women, are more a confirmation of what Trump has boastfully and candidly admitted to in video and audiotapes that now play in an endless loop in campaign coverage, they prompt a wider, deeper search for the meaning of the inner Trump.

Melinda McGillivray said Donald Trump's denial that he had ever groped women prompted her to come forward after years of brushing off an incident from 2003. Credit:AP The Hollywood Reporter has unearthed an unaired 1994 episode of ABC's Primetime Live, in which Trump speaks well of his relationships with women while being interviewed by Nancy Collins. Collins: "So why in 1992 did you tell a writer for New York Magazine, Marie Brenner, that 'you have to treat women like shit …" Summer Zervos at a news conference with her attorney Gloria Allred in Los Angeles on Friday. Credit:AP Trump: "I didn't say that. The woman's a liar, extremely unattractive, lots of problems because of her looks."

Collins: "That statement is exactly why women think you're a chauvinist pig." Trump: "They're right, and not. People say, 'How can you say such a thing?' but there's a truth in it, in a modified form. Psychologists will tell you that some women want to be treated with respect, others differently. I tell friends who treat their wives magnificently [but] get treated like crap in return: 'Be rougher and you'll see a different relationship.' Unfortunately, with people in general, you get more with vinegar than honey." Trump further explored his deep psychological understanding of women when he and his New York radio shock-jock buddy Howard Stern had an on-air conversation about actress Lindsay Lohan in 2004, now exhumed from the archives by CNN. In the interview, Trump ventures reasons for his belief that Lohan likely is "great in bed". "She's probably deeply troubled and therefore great in bed," he told Stern before revealing presidential profundity with this question: "How come the deeply troubled women, you know, deeply, deeply troubled, they're always the best in bed?"

Trump answers his own question: "For some reason, what I said is true. It's just unbelievable. You don't want to be with them for the long term, but for the short term there's nothing like it." Trump's campaign has been all at sea in its response to the stories of abuse that have cascaded into the campaign in the past week. Trump and his running mate, the hapless Indiana governor Mike Pence, insisted the campaign would produce evidence to refute the women's stories. At a rally on Thursday, Trump was emphatic: "We already have substantial evidence to dispute these lies, and it will be made public in an appropriate way and at an appropriate time, very soon." But on Friday, Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks told CBS News that Trump does not plan to release "evidence" that would discredit more than a dozen accounts of sexual impropriety. "I didn't say that," Hicks said. "Governor Pence did."

And Trump's surrogates become befuddled and bullying in their efforts to counter the stories. Appearing on MSNBC's Morning Joe on Friday, Trump's one-time challenger for the nomination, Ben Carson, demanded a microphone be cut to stop a female journalist asking questions about the women's accounts. And Fox Business anchor Lou Dobbs re-tweeted to his almost 800,000 followers the phone number and address of one of Trump's accusers. Instead, Trump is using his appearances before raucous rallies to push back in his customary style, denigrating the stories and denigrating their owners with vitriol and an argument that, deconstructed, amounts to this: "Would a man as attractive, as handsome as me move on a woman as ugly as her?" The women are "horrible" and "sick", their stories are "phony". Boosters at his rallies used to call for Hillary Clinton to be locked up; now they want these women locked up. At a Friday rally in Greensboro in North Carolina, Trump mocked Jessica Leeds who had told The New York Times of Trump molesting her on an aircraft about 30 years ago.

Describing her as "that horrible woman", he mimicked Leeds: "'I was sitting with him on an airplane, and he went after me on the plane …' Yeah, I'm gonna go after. Believe me, she would not be my first choice, that I can tell you." His final insult to Leeds was issued in a singsong voice: "When you looked at that horrible woman last night, you said, 'I don't think so'." He did the same to another of his accusers, former People magazine reporter Natasha Stoynoff, who wrote of Trump attacking her and insisting they would have an affair in a break during an interview at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in 2005. Calling Stoynoff a "liar," he got laughs when he threw in: "Check out her Facebook, you'll understand." One person claiming to be a witness has come to Trump's defence. Englishman Anthony Gilberthorpe, a former Conservative activist, made headlines in 2014 with allegations he had once supplied underage boys at Tory politicians' parties.

Claiming to have been a passenger sitting next to Trump and Leeds, Gilberthorpe, who would have been 17 at the time, told the New York Post Trump had not made an advance. Instead Leeds had been "flirtatious" and, while Trump was in a toilet, she confided she wanted to marry Trump. From all that Trump has said on the record, he clearly is fixated on appearance and physical attractiveness, and his own inestimable measures of each is his benchmark. In this regard, Clinton became a target on Friday, when Trump referred to last Sunday's candidates' debate: "And when she walked in front of me, believe me, I wasn't impressed." Barack Obama, too, seems to have been consigned to the same basket of uglies when Trump charged: "Why doesn't some woman maybe come up and say [about him] what they say falsely about me." Trump now folds all his arguments into a single charge: a conspiracy by "a global power structure" of corporate interests, the media and Clinton to bring him down.

And when he's not hectoring the media, we have the spectacle of a man who is wearing out an army of fact-checkers lecturing journalists on how to do their jobs: "Unfounded accusations are treated as fact, with reporters throwing due diligence and fact-finding to the side in a rush to file their stories first. It's evident that we truly are living in a broken system." But for all Trump's mewling and puking, Politico magazine's Jack Shafer offers a Trump-like reality check. Comparing the media's current treatment of Trump with that of former president Bill Clinton in the midst of his sex scandals through the 1990s, Shafer writes: "[In] the January-February 1998 period during which Bill Clinton was accused of having an affair with a White House intern and vociferously denied it, we don't find a press feeding frenzy. No, it was more like a bloody bacchanalia, as reporters filed their teeth down to dagger points, and tore through Clinton's lies and obfuscations until he wearily conceded the affair that August." Pointing out that Trump's denials are inconsistent with the evidence, Shafer observes: "He bears some responsibility for the pile-on coverage for issuing an unequivocal denial during the second presidential debate that he 'actually [kissed] women without consent or grope[d] women without consent?'. 'No, I have not,' Trump said. "Paradoxically, Trump's media management is only feeding the very frenzy he's griping about. Just as Bill Clinton's lies about his [Gennifer] Flowers affair made reporters expand their search, so have Trump's fishy denials."

These days, Trump has good reason to feel unloved. His polls are going through the floor and some of the GOP's mega-million-dollar donors are telling the party they'll take their money elsewhere, unless the party abandons him as its candidate. Loading But closer to home, it seems even his thousands of employees don't share his belief that he is either God's gift to the US or to women, not if their donations to his campaign are a yardstick. Electoral financial records show that, on average, his 22,450 staff have donated just US23¢ each, a total of just $US5298 ($955). By contrast, Clinton's former colleagues at the State Department have contributed $US324,000 to her campaign.