Retired stockbroker, 81, testifies about how Donald Trump groped him on a plane

A retired stockbroker today told a court how Donald Trump Groped her on the plane and tried to kiss her in front of other passengers.

Jessica Leeds, 81, said it felt like she had a “billion hands” when the former president placed his hands on her breasts in a first class seat in 1979.

Another passenger had ‘saucer eyes’ when she saw Trump put his hand up her skirt before she fought him off and moved to another seat.

The testimony came in the second week of magazine writer E. Jean Carroll’s civil lawsuit against Trump, whom she accused of raping her in a department store dressing room in 1996.

Leeds said she was working as a traveling sales representative for a newsprint company in 1979 when she flew from Houston or Atlanta to New York.

Trump was sitting in the window seat next to her and he introduced himself and they shook hands. Leeds did not know who he was as she lived outside New York at the time.

They ate their food and talked for a while and then “all of a sudden Trump decided to kiss me and grope me,” Leeds told the jury.

The court heard there was nothing in their conversation to suggest she wanted anything sexual.

Leeds said, ‘It was like a tussle. His hands and feet were trying to kiss me and were trying to pull me towards him.

‘He grabbed my chest. It was like he had 40 billion hands. It was a tug of war match between the two of us.

‘When he started putting his hand up my skirt, it gave me a jolt of strength and I managed to jump out of the seat.’

She went back to her seat in the coach before being unexpectedly upgraded to first class.

Leeds told the jury she did not scream but added that ‘the people behind us must have thought something was happening because the chair was shaking’.

He said, ‘The man who is sitting across the aisle from me, his eyes were like saucers. I remember where the hostesses were thinking? Why doesn’t anyone come?

‘Then I realized that no one was going to help me and I would have to do it on my own.’

Leeds said that although the attack only lasted a few seconds, it felt like ‘forever’ and came ‘suddenly’.

After the flight landed, she stayed on board until everyone had left because she didn’t want to risk bumping into Trump in the terminal.

She kept quiet about it for decades because there was ‘a lot men could do’ at work at the time and Leeds felt it was along the same lines.

But when Trump ran for president, he wrote a letter to the New York Times, which contained a story about him.

She said Trump was “not the kind of person I wanted as president”.

Leeds said she was ‘furious’ after watching presidential debate where Trump denied harassing women

He told the jury, ‘He was lying.’

Asked how she knew, she said, “My experience with him.”

According to Leeds, Trump addressed her claims at a rally where he said something along the lines of ‘he would never pass her because she was too old’.

Leeds, whose grandmother was a suffragette, laughed when the court was shown a video of Trump at a rally saying she would be ‘not my first choice.’

He said this showed that he ‘couldn’t imagine passing a 78-year-old woman’ who was his age at the time.

Leeds said she was 37 at the time of the attack on the plane.

When asked why she thought Trump did it, she said it was because he was ‘bored’.

There was an audible gasp in the courtroom as Leeds told the jury she had seen Trump two years after the incident when he called her a ‘c***’.

She said she was working for the Humane Society of New York at Saks Fifth Avenue when Trump and his heavily pregnant wife, Ivana, came up to her desk and asked for her table number.

He remembered her clearly and thought about saying something but held his tongue.

Leeds said, ‘As soon as he took the chips off my hands (table), he looked at me and said I miss you, you f***ing with the plane.’

Leeds said it felt like ‘a bucket of water had been thrown at me’.

Earlier in the day, Trump accuser E. Gene Carroll repeated “he pulled my panties down” during a call to Lisa Birnbach in the mid-1990s.

Birnbach said that Carroll had sworn she would ‘never speak about it again’ and she remained silent until 2019 when Carroll went public and Trump was president.

Carroll, 79, claims Trump, 76, assaulted her in a changing room at a Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan around 1996.

She is seeking at least $75,000 in damages for battery and defamation after he tried to ‘destroy’ her by calling her a liar on social media.

Trump denied the claims and said Carroll made the accusations to boost sales of his memoir, where he publicly accused them for the first time.

The trial, which was now in its second week, heard that Birnbach was a ‘close, close, close friend’ of Carroll and had known him for more than 20 years.

Bernbach, a reporter, stated that the assault may have occurred in the early months of 1996 as she had just returned from Trump’s Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, and wrote about it in an article for New York magazine that was published in happened. February that year.

She was at home with her children when Carol called and said: ‘You won’t believe what happened to me.’

Bernbach said Carroll was ‘breathless, hyperventilating, emotional’. Bernbach said, ‘Her voice was saying all kinds of things.’

Carroll told Bernbach how she met Trump outside Bergdorf Goodman and went to the lingerie department to help find a gift for a girl.

Bernbach told the court that he thought Carroll’s decision to move in with him was a bit ‘naughty’, but did not think he (Trump) was dangerous because I had only spent a few days with him, referring to his visit to Florida. For the article.

Carroll told him that after some “humorous banter” in the dressing room, “Trump slammed him against the wall”, then did so.

Birnbach said Carroll told him the former president had pinned him down by one arm and shoulder and pulled down his trunks with the other.

‘I. Jean said several times: ‘He pulled my tights down’, almost as if she couldn’t believe it. She was still processing it, it had just happened’, Birnbach said.

Carroll then went on to describe how Trump ‘got into her.’

Birnbach said she was feeding her young children in her kitchen and came out of the room to say to Carol: ‘He raped you, you should go to the police.’

Carol replied: ‘No, no, no, I don’t want to go to the police.’

According to Birnbach, they ‘fought’ and Carroll’s description of the attack resembled a ‘physical fight’.

‘ She said promise me you’ll never talk about this again and promise me you won’t tell anyone. I promised him both of those things,’ Bernbach said.

Bernbach then ‘buried’ the story for decades until 2019 when Carroll went public with her memoir and agreed to be named as the person Carroll called after she recovered.

When he did so he was subjected to a stream of anti-Semitic messages via email and social media, he told the court.

Bernbach said Carroll didn’t speak up because she was ‘not a victim’ and ‘didn’t want anybody’s pity.’

She added: ‘She’s someone who instead of making love puts on lipstick, dusts herself off and moves on. This is how he has lived his life.

Asked why she was there, Birnbach said: ‘I’m here because my friends who are nice people told me that something terrible happened and as a result they lost their jobs and their lives were very, very difficult. Went. I am here because I am her friend and I want the world to know because she was telling the truth.

Birnbach told the jury that she was a registered Democrat who voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election and that in a podcast she hosted, she called Trump a “narcissistic sociopath.”

He also called her an ‘agent of Vladimir Putin’ and a ‘herpes-like infection that you can’t get rid of’.

Trump is not expected to testify and is currently visiting Scotland where he is opening a new golf course with a later stop in Ireland.

The jury is expected to see a video statement he made of the case, which has been described as ‘false’ by his own lawyers.