Even by the extraordinary standards of Donald Trump, it was a creepy chat-up line.

We were at 30,000ft on Trump’s private jet flying to Florida, when he showed me his white leather double bed. ‘I like beautiful things,’ he purred seductively. ‘That’s why I like you so much.’

This was just one of many revealing and excruciating moments during the two weeks I spent with Trump in 1995 while making a 60-minute profile of him for ITV – a fortnight which started with a charm offensive, but ended in bitterness, recrimination and intimidating letters that only stopped when I threatened legal action.

Selina Scott (pictured right) met American billionaire Donald Trump (left) while filming a documentary on him for ITV in 1995. After the film aired she claims she received numerous spiteful letters from Trump

It is a curious truth about Trump that he believes the more obnoxious he is the more successful he becomes.

Intimidation is a brutal weapon he has used all his life when the sweet-talking fails to get him his own way.

So it comes as no surprise to me that this is a tactic he is using to such effect in the strangest wooing of the American electorate in the nation’s history.

The more he trashes America, the higher his approval ratings. When he insults Mexicans, calls for a ban on Muslims, disrespects women and declares he will ‘bomb the s***’ out of Islamic State, a cheer goes up.

Every time the commentariat say he has gone too far, he proves he has found a direct link to the dark heart of the American psyche.

As Iowa citizens vote tomorrow in the first ballot to determine the Republican candidate for the White House, many are asking: who really is Donald Trump?

Is he a regular guy who speaks the truth as he sees it, or just a bigmouth who appears to think he is the star of a reality TV show? I think I have a unique perspective.

Trump is a shark. A shark has no yesterday and no tomorrow. Just the next meal, the next victim to be destroyed and consumed. And a shark must keep moving or die.

That’s Trump. Let me tell you what happened when I met him.

Furious: Tycoon Donald Trump, left, went 'ballistic'after the ITV profile was aired, claims Selina Scott (right)

It would have been easy to have been overwhelmed by the tidal wave of flattery and attention I received from Trump when I arrived in New York to make a documentary about the man now dividing America with his inflammatory rhetoric.

Checking into my suite at the exclusive Plaza Hotel, which Trump then owned, overlooking Central Park, I was greeted by a forest of blood-red roses with a tasteful handwritten note that simply said: ‘Donald.’

Later that day, when I went to meet Trump at his Manhattan office, his secretary Norma had been well briefed.

Although we had never met, she welcomed me as her ‘dear, dear friend’. She ushered me into his panelled boardroom high above the city with magnificent views of the skyline where I was greeted not just by Trump but a phalanx of suited male business associates.

He scrawled across the top: ‘Selina you are a major loser.’ Another letter declared: ‘Dear Selina, I hear your career is going terribly.

‘Gentlemen, I would like you to meet our new partner in the deal. The legendary Selina Scott…’

I prided myself on being a pragmatic interviewer, well versed in the wiles of those seeking to make a favourable impression on camera, but by now I was beginning to feel uneasy.

As I was paraded before Trump’s grinning acolytes, those words began to swim in my head.

‘Partner in the deal’? What did this mean? Did he think he had won me over and I was somehow incorporated into his publicity department, already wrapped up in his deluded sense of his own wonderfulness?

Trump was turning on the full wattage of what he perceived to be his irresistible charm to women, but there was a great deal more of this theatricality to come – as viewers of last week’s Channel 4 documentary The Madness Of Donald Trump would have seen.

The station broadcast an embarrassing clip with him dancing around me, saying: ‘Isn’t she beautiful? She doesn’t think she’s beautiful but she is beautiful,’ while I grimaced.

This flattery came shortly after our first meeting and was swiftly followed by Trump announcing: ‘She shares with [talk show host] Larry King an ability to charm and cajole you into revealing more than you intended. Also she’s a lot better looking.’

Final push: Trump arrives on stage in Iowa just two days ahead of the Caucus leading in the polls

Selina Scott, pictured, got an insight into the lavish lifestyle of Trump during the filming of the documentary

During the two weeks I spent with Trump there were to be helicopter rides over Manhattan, and private jet flights to his lavish ocean-side Florida estate, a trophy property once owned by Marjorie Merriweather Post, one of the richest women in America.

He invited me to his poolside party, boasted about his great skills as a billionaire businessman, and, most tellingly, introduced me to the two most important women in his life – his then wife Marla and his mother Mary.

I believe it’s not too fanciful to suggest that the key to understanding Trump is in his attitude to women.

As Megyn Kelly, the Fox News host, discovered when she asked him about his attitude to women (he has called those he dislikes ‘fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals’), the oily smile is replaced with a deep well of hate if he feels he has not emotionally seduced you.

Trump, pictured in 1996, claimed to Selina Scott that he owned the Empire State Building completely - he later admitted he owned only 50 per cent

I know. I’ve been there. My 60-minute documentary exposed how through bluff, bombast and braggadocio, he had convinced the American business community he was far richer than he was, and that while the rest of his rivals were ‘losers’, he knew how to make the US great.

This ability to blag people into believing he was a commercial genius was most vividly illustrated in a helicopter ride we took over New York. Pointing to the Empire State Building, he told me he owned it.

‘What all of it?’ I asked.

‘Yes, 100 per cent,’ he replied.

Later, forgetting he had told me he wholly owned the building, he said he only owned 50 per cent of it which he then considerably reduced. It was the same story with the Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City.

‘It’s wholly owned by me,’ he said. ‘Are you sure?’ I asked. ‘Well maybe 80 per cent,’ he demurred. ‘Are you quite sure?’ I pressed. He replied: ‘Well it’s actually 50 per cent…’

I showed both assertions in my film with many other inconsistencies with the telling soundtrack It Ain’t Necessarily So.

Trump went ballistic. Over many years he sent me a series of intimidating letters branding me ‘sleazy, unattractive, obnoxious and boring.’ He said I was ‘totally uptight’, and that I had begged him for a date. In his dreams!

This vicious tirade was often accompanied by fanzine newspaper cuttings which purported to show how much money he was making.

He scrawled across the top: ‘Selina you are a major loser.’ Another letter declared: ‘Dear Selina, I hear your career is going terribly.

In the meantime I have had the best year of my entire career. Fitting justice? Yours truly, Donald Trump.’

This broadside was in stark contrast to the creepy chat-up line he deployed aboard the Trump jet. Later, in the same plane, he persuaded Ruby Wax to rubbish me on air while she tried to ingratiate herself with him.

This harassment only stopped when I threatened to take legal action against him for effectively stalking me.

I return to my shark analogy. When a shark smells blood in the water, it strikes with speed and vicious intent. And so with Trump. Any sign of vulnerability is exploited. He only understands force met with force.

Ms Scott said Trump's wife Marla, pictured right with the tycoon and presenter, was 'submissive and silent'

So it is with some amusement that 20 years after I made that film, the giant NBC network in America has asked to buy my Channel 4 interview about Trump, including all unused footage, to put with my original documentary for imminent broadcast.

There is little doubt that Trump sees me as his nemesis. The truth is I had moved on the minute I finished my film.

But he hasn’t, because he is a misogynist. I will never forget his vitriol when he told me about a female American broadcaster who he thought had done him down and his determination to get even with her.

When I said she was only doing her job and that if he wanted to be in the media spotlight he had to handle tough questions, he point-blank refused to agree and said he was going to ‘get her’.

I learned about another woman who had suffered his venom. A prominent New York businessman told me how after some conflict, Trump had set out to wreck his wife’s reputation.

She was a member of Manhattan’s elite, sitting on the boards of many charities, but he bad-mouthed her around town, calling her a ‘hooker’ and other detestable names – almost, her husband said, driving their marriage on to the rocks.

Donald Trump with his mother Mary and Selina Scott. Scott said Trump clearly 'worshipped' his mother

As America prepares to go to the polls, the women’s vote will be crucial in deciding if Trump gets the nomination. So why does he seem to behave with such hatred to women?

I observed him closely with his wife and his mother. It was instructive. Marla, in an enticing white cocktail dress, was blonde and beautiful, just as all Trump’s girlfriends and three wives have been. She was also vacuous, with little conversation.

And while it would be wrong to say she appeared cowed by Trump she was submissive and silent.

We met at his 118-room Miami mansion, an ocean of marble but with a sad, musty, unused air. Trump was giving a party.

It was an awkward occasion. Trump’s brother Fred died an alcoholic and Trump has never drunk, and he didn’t know how much drink to provide for the occasion.

There wasn’t enough. This didn’t help the mood, which further fell away when the camera was switched off. Trump switched off with it. He became sulky and boorish. People quickly drifted away.

This was very typical of Trump’s behaviour. One moment sunny, the next dark. I could feel a nervous tension in all those around him.

This fear contrasted sharply with his mother, Mary Macleod, brought up a crofter on the Hebridean island of Lewis.

Trump boasted she was so poor that when she arrived in America in the 1930s she was barefoot, and still barefoot when she met his father Fred Trump, the son of German immigrants, at a dance. Trump clearly worshipped her.

He took me to meet her in his Trump Tower penthouse. She was perfectly and expensively groomed. Now the shoes were by Chanel.

Her fingernails were a shiny scarlet, the hair coiffeured, her manner impeccable – the perfect wealthy American matron, all trace of the humble Scottish lass airbrushed away. A trophy mother.

Trophy women are undoubtedly important to Trump and there would have been no bigger trophy than Princess Diana. He told friends he might have had a ‘shot’ at her, describing her as his ‘dream lady’.

In his 1997 book, The Art Of The Comeback, he wrote: ‘I only have one regret in the woman department, that I never had the opportunity to court Lady Diana Spencer. I met her on a number of occasions... She lit up the room with her charm, her presence.’

Diana told me: ‘He gives me the creeps.’

Trump’s father exhorted his son to always be a ‘killer’, a curious indoctrination which he has clearly taken to heart.

His incendiary pledges have led to warnings he would set the world in flames if he makes it to the Oval Office.