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In October 2016 Republican candidate Donald Trump came under fire after the release of a decade-old tape capturing him making lewd comments, followed by multiple women coming forward to claim that Trump had groped them. Shortly afterwards, an image containing allegations about incidents of Trump's having sexually abused women circulated via social media: The first claim held that in 1989 Donald Trump's first ex-wife, Ivana, swore under oath in a deposition that he had violently raped her and that somehow that information wasn't brought to light during the comprehensive mudslinging that engulfed the extremely heated 2016 election. But a simple online search shows quite clearly that numerous articles published from the summer of 2015 onwards made frequent reference to Ivana Trump's purported statement: The allegation largely stemmed from a 1993 book about Trump titled Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump by Harry Hurt III, as detailed by the New Yorker: As described, the book was appended with a statement from Ivana Trump disavowing that she intended to use the word rape in its commonly understood manner (i.e., forcible sex without consent): Ivana's statement, according to a Notice to the Reader in the book, does not contradict or invalidate any information contained in this book. The second allegation in the image was less well known and likely new to many social media users, holding that Trump Model Management (New York City modeling agency) was caught trafficking young girls and hiding them in basements — something that likely would have been quite newsworthy, given that human trafficking is an extremely serious crime. This claim originated with a 30 August 2016 Mother Jones article that notably had nothing to do with any allegations that Donald Trump or his modeling agency had engaged in human trafficking. Instead, the Mother Jones article presented a case that Trump's anti-immigration position was hypocritical due to Trump Model Management's purported illegal employment of non-American models. Many of the article's details involved uncompensated work, a grayer legal area and a circumstance not uncommon among hopefuls trying to get a break in the highly competitive field of modeling. The article included comment from Canadian former model Rachel Blais and two unnamed women who claimed they worked for Trump Model Management around the mid-2000s and experienced illegal and/or unethical business practices. Although the details of the article were not flattering to Trump or his agency if accurate, asserting that the article accused Trump or his agents of trafficking young women and hiding them in basements is a gross exaggeration. The word basement appeared a single time in the article and was not mentioned as a place young female models were held against their will but simply as an example of cramped and pricey model's quarters (of a type not exclusive to Trump's modeling agency). The image reproduced above elided the article's description of the unpleasant living arrangements as an unfortunate but not uncommon aspect of the industry that is too often foisted upon aspiring models by agencies: The third and final claim in the meme was perhaps the most widely-reported of all the three things that no one was supposedly talking about. It pertained to a twice-filed civil (not criminal) lawsuit against Donald Trump brought by a woman using the alias Katie Johnson who claimed that Trump sexually and physically abused her at parties hosted by billionaire Jeffrey Epstein when she was 13 years old and then threatened her to ensure her silence: As our article on the lawsuit notes, Katie Johnson has not been identified or interviewed, and she has not provided any information or evidence outside of her court filing. Donald Trump hasn't been afforded any opportunity to confront his accuser or the evidence against him in court, and the case may never get that far. The original poster of the image stated that after the 2005 video of Donald Trump was released she wished just to add fuel to the fire on how disgusting he is by highlighting things the public allegedly had ignored about the candidate's history. But two of the three claims about Trump that the public or the news media are not going to talk about have in fact received widespread media attention, and the third was contorted to the point of being unrecognizable when compared to the source material from which it was derived.
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