We all know the story by now. In 2005, Donald Trump was caught on tape bragging that his fame allowed him to sexually assault women. In 2016, as he was running for president, that recording, the so-called Access Hollywood tape, was made public, resulting in a stream of women coming forward and alleging that Trump had groped or otherwise sexually assaulted them. He was elected anyway; the women’s stories didn’t seem to matter. But they should.

If we have understood one thing in the two years since actor Alyssa Milano tweeted #MeToo, sending the then 11-year-old phrase viral, it is that when women are not listened to, men in positions of power are left free to abuse their authority. When the accused abuser is the president of the United States, those allegations and how they are handled matter all the more. Thanks to his bully pulpit, Trump’s words and actions resonate far beyond the deeds themselves.

And then there is the question of collective responsibility. If we avert our eyes from the allegations of Trump’s abuse because we find it distasteful, we tacitly endorse his behaviour. When we dismiss or ignore his objectification and denigration of women, we legitimise it. Leaving these attitudes and actions unchecked allows them to proliferate.

When the recording was released, Trump brushed it off as “locker-room banter”. A short time later he denied having had affairs with porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal. We, however, conducted more than 100 interviews in the course of researching our book All the President’s Women and found that the language and the affairs were not mere aberrations. Since his campaign, Trump has already faced allegations from nearly two dozen women. Our book reveals another 43 allegations, bringing the total to 67 accusations of inappropriate behaviour, including 26 instances of unwanted sexual contact. In short, far from being occasional or accidental, his alleged misconduct with women was regular and widespread. We found that Trump repeatedly and systematically engaged in aggressive sexual pursuit of women over many decades and that his alleged behaviour followed discernible patterns. One of those was a predilection for young models.

All of a sudden she heard someone shout: 'Put your robes on, here he comes!'

In the early 1980s, NaKina Carr was working in New York for Oscar de la Renta and was backstage in the models’ dressing room at one of his fashion shows when she heard Trump’s name mentioned for the first time. She was getting ready when all of a sudden she heard someone shout: “Put your robes on, here he comes!”

At 21, the Texas native was already on the older side for a catwalk model, who generally start working when they are in their teens, but she was new to New York and had no idea what was going on. “I didn’t know what they were talking about … but suddenly everyone threw on their dressing robes,” Carr said, speaking publicly about her memories of Trump for the first time. Carr asked another woman what was wrong, and she pointed to a man across the room. “She said: ‘He’s the money man. He can do whatever he wants … Unless you’re a gold digger, you avoid him at all costs.’”

Trump walked in as if he owned the place, according to Carr’s account, with a pregnant Ivana, his first wife, trailing behind him. “He threw his arms wide open and said: ‘OK now ladies, drop ’em,’” Carr said. “The one thing I’ll always remember is the dejected look on Ivana’s face in the dressing room. I thought how horrible, that he would treat her in this way.”

As Trump strode around the dressing room, Carr concealed herself behind a pillar, incredulous that someone would be so crude. “The other girls were obviously afraid of him, like they knew he meant it and it wasn’t a joke,” she said. The model was later assured that she was not Trump’s type – at the time the rumours among modelling insiders was that he preferred younger women. “If you’re over 21 you don’t have to worry,” Carr said she was told.

Those rumours appear to be backed up by other accounts of Trump during that era. Model Barbara Pilling was not yet 18 when her booker took her to a party a few days after her arrival in New York, in the summer of 1989. Trump was also in attendance. Pilling didn’t know who the real estate developer was, but she noticed him looking at her. “I could see him eyeing me up and watching me,” she said. She claims that once he caught her gaze, Trump started talking to her. “I remember him saying: ‘Oh, how old are you?’ And I said 17, and he said: ‘That’s just great; you’re not too old, not too young.’”

Pilling said Trump tried to make small talk with her for a while, but his gaze kept veering to her chest. He asked her if she liked where she was living and said he knew great places she could stay if she didn’t. Trump offered to show her the city and to take her to dinner. He told her she was gorgeous, like a dark-haired Marilyn Monroe, and asked her if she would ever consider going blond. “I was starting to feel uncomfortable,” Pilling remembered. “It’s not a nice feeling for a young girl to have an older man making advances on her.” Another model standing nearby whispered to Pilling that Trump clearly liked her, and explained who he was. “I wasn’t impressed by it. I mean, I was only 17.”

From left: Rachel Crooks, Jessica Leeds and Samantha Holvey speak at news conference in New York, 2017. Photograph: Andrew Kelly/Reuters

Pilling eventually excused herself to go to the restroom, where yet another woman was talking about the developer. “She said he grabbed her ass and kept going for her and was all hands,” Pilling said. Between that and her own conversation with him, Pilling was so disturbed that she left the party without saying goodbye to anyone.

When the Australian Shayna Love was living in New York in 1991, she says models were encouraged to attend dinners that became occasions for “men to pick up girls”. “You’d go to these things and look pretty, give the men attention,” Love said. She was 16 at the time and part of the Elite model agency’s “New Faces” campaign. “We might as well have been called ‘fresh meat’.” Love recalled a dinner with Trump. “This time it was a private area, a big table and lots of girls – I’d say around 10 to 15 of us, all between the ages of 14 and 18,” she said. “It was just us models, Trump and [Elite founder] John [Casablancas]. We were all underage, but we were offered drinks.” Love said she went home early, but other girls stayed.

Trump was often seen with Casablancas. He hosted events for Elite’s modelling contests at his New York properties and provided lodging for the contestants. Eli Nessa had just turned 17 and was representing Norway during one such Elite competition hosted by Trump’s hotel in the early 90s. In addition to the events for the competition, the women were expected to attend several nights of parties. “There were all these older men,” she said. “It was so seedy.” Nessa was accompanied by her agent, but other women appeared to be alone. “I remember this Italian girl, extremely naive, who couldn’t speak any English. She was easy prey. They were all around her,” Nessa said. “We were a bunch of kids, just put there with all these older men.”

Heather Braden was also an Elite model and, in the late 90s, alleges that she was instructed to go to a party in a mansion on one of the islands off Miami Beach. Trump was going to be there, she was told. Braden went with a couple of friends who were also models. When they arrived, the first thing they saw was a table manned by two security guards. The models were handed papers. “I presume they were NDAs for us to sign,” Braden recalled. They ignored the papers and walked into a big room where there were about 50 models. In her mid-20s, Braden was one of the oldest women there. Many were from eastern Europe and didn’t speak English, so Braden and her friends kept to themselves.

They found the party odd. There was no DJ, no food, and no bartender – though there were drinks, Braden remembers. “It was very awkward from the beginning,” she said years later. “Fifty females in this room, no real hosts. Very unusual. And then down this large staircase, in front of all of us, there was Donald Trump and behind him there were three actors, 40s, maybe 50s. I don’t want to name them because they’re all still around.” The actors were famous. “They came down the stairs and spread out like sharks among the girls,” who had broken up into little clusters throughout the room. “Obviously, some of these younger girls were starstruck.”

John Casablancas and Trump at the Elite Model Agency Look of the Year awards in 1991. Photograph: Ron Galella/Getty Images

Braden said she had been in the industry long enough to understand what was happening. “Clearly, we were there for one reason. We were just pieces of meat.” At a typical fashion industry party, there would be a mix of people, men of different ages, male models, men in the business. Not here. Braden believed that this party had been set up specifically for Trump and the three actors. “This was not eye candy,” she said. “Sometimes you’re brought to these big parties like that, but this was different.”

From a couch in the farthest corner of the room, Braden and her friends watched as each man made his way through the knots of models. They started with the standard opening lines, asking the women their names and where they were from. “Five minutes later – this is what they did to me: ‘You want to come upstairs?’ It was anything from, ‘You want to see the rest of the house?’ to ‘Do you want to see the bedroom? The view?’ Or ‘Do you want to partake in party favours?’ That was the terminology,” Braden said. “Sometimes there’d be a couple of girls that would go up together.” Braden said Trump approached her at the party, and chuckled when she turned him down.

In addition to Casablancas, whose marriage ended after he had an affair with a 16-year-old Stephanie Seymour and who later married another one of his models when she was 17, Trump’s social circle in the early 90s included Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender who allegedly ran a sex ring of underage girls. Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting a minor and in July 2019 was charged with two federal counts of sex trafficking before being found dead in his prison cell in an apparent suicide in August. Trump once said of Epstein: “Terrific guy. 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.”

Eventually Trump found an easier way to surround himself with models: he started his own agency. Trump Model Management launched in 1999, the same year Trump divorced Marla Maples. When Leonardo DiCaprio – another man with a taste for women who walk the runway – heard about Trump’s new venture, he approvingly dubbed it “one-stop date shopping”.

'Clearly, we were there for one reason … We were just pieces of meat'

Now Trump had the models coming to him, and it is alleged that he introduced them to his sons. Ksenia Maximova said she worked for Trump Model Management in 2003 and 2004, and again a few years later. In 2004, when the Russian-British model was 18, her agent summoned her to a meeting in Trump Tower. “He said: ‘Oh, we’re just going to meet the owner of the agency,’” she said, speaking publicly for the first time about the encounter. “And then he told me to get all dressed up, properly, because I was quite tomboyish, so he did tell me to put a nice dress on and some high heels and stuff.”

Maximova complied, and she and her agent took the elevator to Trump’s offices. The developer was at his desk with Donald Jr, then 26, standing behind him, although they weren’t introduced so Maximova didn’t know this was Trump’s son. She settled on a chair and Trump and her agent began talking. “I was just kind of sitting there,” she said. Trump asked her a few questions but for the most part didn’t address her. Donald Jr was generally silent, too. “It was all really awkward because it was like: ‘Let the grownups do the talking,’ kind of thing,” she said. “It was just like I didn’t matter and he didn’t matter. I just thought he was some aide or something.”

Maximova was made to feel so inconsequential that she began wondering why she had been brought there in the first place. “I didn’t really get introduced much. It was more like just to actually show me, visually. It wasn’t like anyone was interested in my personality or anything like that, so I was like: ‘What’s the point in this?’” She asked her agent as much when they were back in the elevator on their way down to the street. “We’ve heard that [Trump’s son] is maybe looking for a girlfriend now,” Maximova claims her agent told her. “That’s when I got really angry and told him off and asked him to never, ever, please, do this kind of thing again, especially without my consent.”

But even before he put the Trump brand on young models, he had found another business that ensured he would have a steady supply of beautiful young women in his life. In 1996, he purchased the Miss Universe Organisation, which also operates the Miss USA and Miss Teen USA pageants. “It’s a very, very great entertainment format,” he said at the time. “It gets very high ratings, it’s doing very well and we’ll make it even better.” Trump’s improvement plan? “I made sure the women were really beautiful because they were getting a little bit not as beautiful. They had a person who was extremely proud that a number of women had become doctors. And I wasn’t interested,” he said on the Howard Stern radio show. “I made the bikinis smaller and the heels higher,” he told the late-night TV host David Letterman in 2010.

Trump addresses the contestants in the Miss USA beauty pageant in 2012. Photograph: AP

From the very beginning, Trump exercised what he saw as the owner’s prerogative. “I’ll go backstage before a show, and everyone’s getting dressed and ready and everything else,” Trump told Stern in 2005. “No men are anywhere, and I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant and therefore I’m inspecting it … ‘Is everyone OK?’ You know, they’re standing there with no clothes. ‘Is everybody OK?’ And you see these incredible looking women, and so I sort of get away with things like that.”

At times, Trump’s gaze was more targeted. Samantha Holvey told CNN that when she was 20 and competing in the 2006 Miss USA pageant, Trump made pointed visual inspections of all the contestants. “He would step in front of each girl and look you over from head to toe like we were just meat, we were just sexual objects, that we were not people,” she said. “You know when a gross guy at the bar is checking you out? It’s that feeling.” Being ogled by Trump made Holvey feel “the dirtiest I felt in my entire life”. She and her fellow contestants were also invited to private parties filled with “old, rich, drunk guys ogling all over us”, Holvey said.

These women are just a sample of those who have come forward with accusations against Trump; new allegations continue to emerge. And while Trump is the most visible of the influential men accused of predatory behaviour, he is far from an outlier, as even a cursory glance at recent headlines illustrates. Jeffrey Epstein. Harvey Weinstein. R Kelly. Hundreds of men were brought down in the wake of #MeToo as women began to share their stories.

Still, these reckonings, while important, are not the ultimate solution, because the individual men are not themselves the core of the problem; that runs much deeper. These abuses took place over the course of decades and were far from secret. All too often, institutions sacrificed accusers to protect themselves and the coteries that ran them. If lasting and significant change is to take place, it will require a significant overhaul of the systems and societal attitudes that allowed that to happen.

• Edited and extracted from All The President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator by Barry Levine & Monique El-Faizy, published in the UK on 23 October by Trapeze (£20) – to order a copy go to guardianbookshop,com – and in the US on 22 October by Hachette ($29). It is published in Australia on 23 October by Hachette ($32.99). Also available as an audiobook. Lucy Osborne, whose reporting contributed to the book, continues to investigate Trump and women. Her email is lucy.osborne@theguardian.com