Jill Harth (Facebook/Jill Harth)
Jill Harth, a New York-based makeup designer, became the first woman to accuse Donald Trump of groping her in an unwanted sexual manner when she filed a lawsuit against him in 1997. She dropped the lawsuit and thought that the matter was closed — until, she says, Trump made an issue of it in his presidential campaign this year, accusing Harth of lying about the groping claims.
Harth then gave a series of media interviews in July of this year, after almost two decades of keeping silent about the accusations. In the interviews, she revisited her allegations against Trump, allegations that her earlier lawsuit described as “attempted rape.”
Since then, she says, her business has suffered and she has been accused of merely seeking publicity by going public with her accusations against Trump.
Harth took to her personal Facebook page Friday afternoon to post a reply to her critics — a reply in which called people who believe she was seeking publicity by discussing her accusations against Trump “complete idiots.”
(Facebook/Jill Harth)
“People who think I spoke about Trump for the publicity are complete idiots. I never wanted to speak about it. Trump brought it up by answering press questions about me and called me a liar repeatedly. I had to defend myself. He’s hurt me and my livelihood from HIS recent public words to me. By having this all blown up again, it ripped open the old wound,” she wrote, adding that since she dropped the lawsuit she and Trump had been on “cordial terms” and she even supported his presidential campaign.
“I was on his side UNTIL HE BACK STABBED ME! So to all the people who don’t believe me: I don’t care what you think. You are nothing to me and you must be a complete low life not to understand. Read the WHOLE STORY. I was outed by Lawnewz in February online for all the world to see. My 1997 complaint is online. It was a complete violation of my privacy and caused me much distress and embarrassment. I didn’t do anything wrong. TRUMP DID this to himself! He should have shut up,” she wrote.
After the online legal publication Lawnewz first posted Harth’s legal complaint against Trump, the candidate himself spoke to the web site — taking time out from the Republican National Convention to make the phone call — and dismissed Harth’s allegations, claiming that she made the charges because “she was in love with me.”
“If you look in the National Enquirer, there was a story in there that she was in love with me. The woman has real problems,” Trump claimed in his own LawNewz interview. “It’s ridiculous, I’ve never touched this woman.”