Rachel Crooks, who has accused President Donald Trump of forcibly kissing her in 2005, secured her Democratic nomination for her seat on Tuesday after running unopposed, CNN reports.
Crooks, the 35-year-old Democrat running for state legislature in Ohio, is a former receptionist who worked in Trump Tower. She accused the President of forcibly kissing her in 2005 and came forward with her accusation in 2016 just before the general election.
Trump denied the accusation after The Washington Post covered the allegations in detail in February.
“A woman I don’t know and, to the best of my knowledge, never met, is on the FRONT PAGE of the Fake News Washington Post saying I kissed her (for two minutes yet) in the lobby of Trump Tower 12 years ago. Never happened! Who would do this in a public space with live security cameras running,” the President tweeted.
Crooks challenged the President through her campaign’s Twitter account at the time to show video footage of the alleged date of the incident.
“Please, by all means, share the footage from the hallway outside the 24th-floor residential elevator bank on the morning of January 11, 2006,” her campaign account tweeted. “Let’s clear this up for everyone. It’s liars like you in politics that have prompted me to run for office myself.”
Crooks in February said that friends and a liberal activist group encouraged her to run for office and that she was inspired by a wave of Democratic activism in the face of Trump’s election.
“I think like a lot of women because we’ve been historically underrepresented in politics, I didn’t necessarily see myself in this role,” she said. “But multiple people encouraged and said, ‘I think you would be great’ … Once I sat down and mulled it over, I felt like it really was a duty that I had, that I should take on this responsibility firsthand and try to make a difference for other people.”
Be the first to comment