When Christmas rolled around, the entire Bayrock office was invited to Trump’s party. Crooks couldn’t attend because the city was in the midst of a transit strike, and she was living far away in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. “I’d basically have had to hitchhike home if I went to the party,” she says. The next time she saw Trump at the elevators, she decided to go thank him for inviting her to the party. “I don’t know what drove me to do that,” she says. “All I can remember is feeling very confident in approaching him and not wanting to be the receptionist. I don’t know.”

She’s told the story of what happened after that too many times to count, and now she retells it quickly, in shorthand: They shook hands, and then he gave her a double-cheek kiss, which is something she’d come to expect from important New York men and thought of as totally normal. Not so normal was the way that Trump kept kissing her on each cheek over and over, in between saying things like, “Where are you from? You should be a model. Do you know I have my own agency?,” and then kissing her on the lips. Then he went up the elevator. (Trump has denied all allegations of sexual impropriety.)

Crooks felt strange. She immediately hid in her boss’s office and called her sister, she says. “I was trying to explain what happened, and not knowing how to interpret it,” she says. “I can’t believe he thought I was so insignificant that he could do that.” She felt ashamed and denigrated by the encounter. “I thought to myself, ‘What image was I portraying, that you thought you could take advantage of me like that?’ I was embarrassed that I did something that made me come off the wrong way, completely the wrong way.”

Crooks only stayed in the city a few more months. Her boyfriend was outraged by her story about Trump, and didn’t want to be in the city anyway; he soon left to study abroad. “Do not go home because of that man,” she says her aunt warned her, referring to Trump. And she doesn’t think she left New York because of Trump. Not really. “I didn’t want to stay in New York by myself after my boyfriend left, but maybe if I had had a better work experience, it wouldn’t have been so bad. Hard to say.”

“If there’s a spectrum of accosting women, what happened to me is minor,” she continued. “But these things chip away at you, like that comment about the boob job. God. Totally eroding.”

When she first came forward, after the Billy Bush tape was made public, Crooks had high hopes that women’s voices, including hers, could be dispositive. She’d consulted closely with her sister and friends before coming forward publicly, and they encouraged her, saying she might change an election. “I thought it was making a difference at first—women speaking out. It seemed like the discourse about Trump was becoming more negative.” But after the [James] Comey letter, things changed. “The public seems very fickle. This man who was accused of sexual misconduct and assault had won over a very accomplished woman. It was like, ‘How can this still be happening?’”

On the night of Trump’s election, Crooks didn’t watch TV. When she went to sleep, she didn’t know that Trump might have landed the presidency. Her friend sent one word to her in the middle of the night via text: sigh. She soon signed up for a bus trip to D.C. for the Women’s March. “More like the women’s shuffle,” she says. Two charter buses left from Columbus, and she sat in a seat alongside her aunt; representatives from the Ohio legislature and a former U.S. congresswoman were on their way with them too. Standing at the front of the bus, a leader asked each attendee to tell everyone why they were attending the march. “And the very first woman said, ‘I’m here because I believe those 16 women.’” Crooks held her aunt’s hand and squeezed it, crying a little.

Crooks lives in a small town in Trump country, and still feels nervous thinking about Trump’s supporters sometimes. “I was once walking my dog on a wooded path, and a jogger was coming toward me, then stopped and said, ‘You’re one of the girls who came out about Trump,’” she says. “My heart was thumping. Then, he said, ‘I think you’re great.’”

She takes her hand off the stem of her white wine, and gestures to the East Side. “Maybe it’s an irrational fear, but I was there on the path all alone. Trump has said that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and people would still like him, and he’s right. He believes he can get away with anything.”