'It felt like tentacles': the women who accuse Trump of sexual misconduct

The list of women who have publicly made sexual misconduct allegations against Donald Trump outnumbers the list of officials in his cabinet. Before today, no fewer than 25 women had made such accusations against Trump, ranging from harassment to sexual assault and rape.

Related: Donald Trump accused of sexual assault by former model

The allegations span four decades. Trump has denied every charge, dismissing his accusers as liars and publicity seekers, claiming never to have met some of them and, in at least two cases, suggesting they were not attractive enough for him.

Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential race suggests a sizeable portion of the American electorate either believed his claims of innocence or were unswayed by the allegations.

Today Amy Dorris becomes at least the 26th woman to publicly accuse Trump of sexual misconduct – with more than a dozen of that group having accused him of sexual assault. In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, she has alleged that Trump accosted her outside the bathroom of his VIP box at the US Open tennis tournament in New York in 1997.

She accused Trump of forcing his tongue down her throat, touching her all over her body and holding her in a grip from which she could not escape, while ignoring her pleas to stop. “His hands were very gropey and all over my butt, my breasts, my back, everything,” she said, recalling how she used her teeth to try to force his tongue out of her mouth. “I felt trapped.”

Via his lawyers, Trump denied in the strongest possible terms having ever harassed, abused or behaved improperly toward Dorris.

Some women making #MeToo sexual misconduct allegations have been forced to rely solely only on their own memories of events. But Dorris immediately shared her account of the alleged incident with two people and has recounted it to several others since. All said Dorris had shared with them details of the alleged incident that matched what she told the Guardian.

Dorris also has six photos of her encounters with Trump over the four days she spent with him, and kept her ticket to the US Open from the day of the alleged assault, 5 September 1997. “I feel like there’s a lot of girls who have had a lot worse from him. But in this case, he’s not going to be able to say he doesn’t know me,” she said.

Dorris is the second woman to accuse Trump of assaulting her at the US Open. Karena Virginia, also a former model, alleges Trump touched her breast at the tournament in 1998. When Virginia made her allegation in 2016, a Trump representative dismissed her account as “fictional” and politically motivated.

Virginia and Dorris are not the only former models to say Trump assaulted them. More than half of the accusations made against Trump, who bought the Miss Universe franchise in 1996 and set up his own modelling agency, Trump Model Management, in 1999, relate to models or pageant contestants.

One was Kristin Anderson, who was a model in her early 20s when she alleges Trump sexually assaulted her. She claims he put his hand up her skirt and touched her genitals through her underwear when they were at a nightclub in New York in the early 1990s. Trump claimed Anderson was seeking “free publicity” and said her allegation was “phoney”.

Taken together, the accusations paint a pattern of alleged predatory behaviour.

Alleged assaults at Mar-a-Lago

Dorris claims Trump assaulted her after waiting for her outside the bathroom while Trump’s other US Open guests, including Dorris’s then boyfriend, Jason Binn, were just metres away.

The dividing wall is visible behind Trump and Dorris’s head in photographs she has shared with the Guardian. It can also be seen in a photo taken the day after the alleged assault, when Dorris returned for a second day of tennis and she and Binn posed for photographs with celebrities including Leonardo DiCaprio and the illusionist David Blaine, who were among Trump’s other guests that day. DiCaprio and Blaine did not respond to requests for comment.

Karen Johnson, a former dancer, has claimed she was “grabbed and pulled behind a tapestry” by Trump during a New Year’s Eve party at his Mar-a-Lago resort in the early 2000s, when he allegedly groped and forcibly kissed her. In a similarity with Dorris’s allegation, Johnson alleged the assault happened just out of sight from other guests, including her husband, while she was on her way to the bathroom. Trump has denied the accusation.

These allegations also have similarities with those made by Jill Harth, who claimed Trump sexually assaulted her after pulling her into his daughter Ivanka’s childhood bedroom at Mar-a-Lago in the early 1990s, during a group tour of the residence. Her then boyfriend, George Houraney, was also in the Palm Beach residence at the time.

Harth’s allegations were initially contained in a lawsuit brought against Trump following a business dispute she and Houraney had with him. Harth later withdrew the lawsuit and Trump’s lawyers say she has no credibility. A spokesman for Trump said he “denies each and every statement made by Ms Harth”.

The journalist Natasha Stoynoff also alleges she was assaulted in a room at Mar-a-Lago with people close by. She was scheduled to interview Trump about his first year of marriage to his third wife, Melania, who was then pregnant with their son Barron. Stoynoff alleges that as Melania was changing in a nearby room, “within seconds he was pushing me against the wall and forcing his tongue down my throat”. Trump denied the allegation, saying: “Take a look. Look at her. Look at her words. And you tell me what you think. I don’t think so.”

Last year, the writer E Jean Carroll came forward to accuse Trump of raping her in the mid-1990s. She too alleges he pushed her against a wall, this time in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman, a luxury department store in Manhattan. Last November, Carroll sued Trump for defamation after he called her a liar and said he had never met her. Last month a New York judge rejected Trump’s bid to temporarily halt proceedings.

In January the former Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos, who accused Trump in 2016 of forcibly kissing her and groping her breast, had her defamation lawsuit put on hold after several attempts by Trump to delay it. A New York court of appeal is yet to determine whether to dismiss the case, allow it to continue or postpone it until Trump is out of office. Zervos is one of 11 women, including Dorris, Stoynoff and Johnson, to claim that Trump forcibly kissed them.

Several women have also described being allegedly groped in a fashion similar to that recounted by Dorris.

The allegation that most resonated with Dorris in 2016, when many of his accusers first came forward, was that of Jessica Leeds, whose accusation against Trump is the most historical.

Leeds said that in the late 70s when she was a travelling businesswoman she had sat beside Trump, whom she had never met before, in the first-class cabin of a flight to New York. She alleged that about 45 minutes after takeoff Trump lifted the armrest, grabbed her breasts and tried to put his hand up her skirt. Trump responded to Leeds’s allegation at a campaign rally, saying: “Believe me, she would not be my first choice. That I can tell you.” A Trump spokesman called her allegation “fiction”.

Leeds alleged Trump’s “hands were everywhere”, describing them as “like an octopus”.

That is exactly how Dorris says she described her alleged encounter with Trump to friends over the years. “It felt like there were tentacles on me that I couldn’t rip off,” she said. “I was trying to get his arms off of me and they would not come off because I wasn’t strong enough.”

She said she felt like she was suffocating. “It’s like his arms were moving so fast, it was like he had eight,” she said. “You just picture those suction cups on an octopus and they’re stuck on you. You’re trapped. That’s how I felt.”

The Access Hollywood tape

Trump famously bragged about sexually molesting women in the now–infamous Access Hollywood tape. In the recording, first published by the Washington Post during the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump can be heard making a series of lewd remarks about women to the TV host Billy Bush while off-air.

“I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her,” he said in the previously unaired recording about the actor and model Arianne Zucker, whom they were waiting to meet. “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. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything … Grab ’em by the pussy.”

Trump dismissed the recording as mere “locker room talk”. Leeds, who is now in her 70s, said it was Trump’s defence of his comments that drove her to come forward with her story. She said she “wanted to punch the screen”, and days later wrote to the New York Times about her allegation, telling them: “His behaviour is deep-seated in his character.”

Dorris said the video was “triggering” for her, too, reminding her of both the alleged assault and the way Trump acted toward her in the days afterwards, including on a trip to a memorial service for Gianni Versace.

She recalled how Trump, who was sat next to her, “kept leaning over and asking me: ‘How much longer do we have to be here? How much longer does this have to take?’… I felt like I was with a small child.”

She was one of the few non-celebrities there. “Elton John sang a song, Madonna read a poem, Whitney Houston sang. I mean, it was superstars constantly.”

“He kept asking me if I wanted a Tic Tac and he kept eating Tic Tacs,” she said. “They were making so much noise.” According to Dorris, Trump continued to pursue her, which she said she ignored because she did not want to “make a scene”.

Now, whenever Dorris hears a reference to the Access Hollywood tape, or a mention of Tic Tacs, the memories return. “The only thing that I can think of is him and that incident and that weekend,” she said.

Dorris said she felt that Trump had been seeking to make it look like they were a couple throughout the weekend she was in New York, in spite of the fact she was there with her boyfriend. Dorris recalls Trump claiming after the memorial to have been given the supermodel Stephanie Seymour’s phone number, but appeared to rip it up in front of Dorris, telling her he only wanted hers.

Dorris recalls one newspaper mistaking her for Trump’s then wife, Marla Maples, and a picture of them appeared in the New York Daily News.

“Yesterday we called Donald Trump’s office to ask the name of that lovely blonde at his side,” the caption read. “Proving that hell might still freeze over, a spokeswoman responded: ‘Donald said he wants to keep his private life private. He said it is not fair to expose this girl to the mean world of the paparazzi.’”

Trump’s lawyers said her allegations did not stand up to scrutiny and had there been any inappropriate behaviour by Trump outside of the bathroom within the VIP box, there would have been numerous witnesses.

They said Jason Binn – who did not respond to requests for comment from the Guardian – had told the president’s US lawyers he had no recollection of Dorris telling him that anything inappropriate had happened with Trump. They also questioned why Dorris, after the alleged assault, would choose to spend two more days in the company of Trump, at the US Open and the Versace memorial event.

They said Dorris had never raised the allegations with a law enforcement agency or Trump, and suggested the timing of her claims so close to the November presidential election suggested they might be politically motivated.

Coming forward

Dorris said she considered coming forward in 2016, when many of Trump’s other accusers chose to do so, but she was concerned for her twin daughters and could see that many of the women were being dismissed or ignored, which caused “a lot of anxiety and fear”.

Several of Trump’s accusers from 2016 have told the Guardian about the profound impact speaking out has had on their lives. Some say they were turned down for jobs and struggled to find work; others received hate mail and endured online harassment.

Virginia, who had death threats sent to her family home after going public with her allegations against Trump, which she reported to the police, feels that the context has changed since the advent of the #MeToo era: “We came forward pre-#MeToo and it was a different world then; our voices weren’t listened to.”

Dorris lives in Palm Beach county, not far from Mar-a-Lago. “I have a lot of friends that are Trump supporters, so it’s just been a little difficult,” she said.

“I don’t feel safe,” she said, but added: “It’s time to speak out.”

She said she was not coming forward for “political reasons”. “I’ve always been independent and I’ve voted Republican many times. If he was a Democrat I would still come forward,” she said. “It’s about the example he’s setting. He’s shut down every woman who has come forward.”

She added: “I’ve noticed a shift in how women are being treated since he became president … so I am coming out for me, for my kids.”