Here again, because it’s, er, timely, is my post on Trump threatening to tear me to bits when I was 20.
I thought I should repost:
It was on the phone. I was twenty and an intern reporter at TIME. Trump was being sued by a hotel chain. I had to call Trump, and ask him about it, and straight away he started calling me “Babe.” It was “Babe” this and “Babe” that. His voice was gold — a veritable sunbath– (or was it a golden shower? let’s add that January 2017).
At any rate, he spoke to me, a 20 year old reporter and he a far older ‘businessman’ as if he and I were oh so close, even intimate. Such is the method of charming insolent un-serious men.
Then I read aloud to him, still on the phone, as a TIME reporter in New York, one of the allegations against him, which I had before me in print in the Affadavit.
You should have felt it. The change in atmosphere — even on the phone — when a man such as he drops his charm.
“You Print That,” Trump told me, “and I’ll Sue You.”
He’d sue me — a 20 year old intern, a Columbia student, an almost girl reading from a legal affadavit that did not please him, did not match his idea of himself….
I wish I could say it was the last time I heard a man turn on a dime, see the flash of virulence beneath the charm. I wish I had learned my lesson, right then.
These men — these charming powerful men of a certain kind – how many times must they reveal themselves before we finally dump them? Keep Trying, I say. Keep trying until it takes.