Trump Has Been Accused Of Unwanted Touching Again

In the sad-but-not-surprising department, yet another woman has accused Donald Trump of groping her. Former Miss Finland Ninni Laaksonen claims Trump grabbed her backside when the two were backstage at The Late Show With David Letterman in 2006, according to the Finnish tabloid Ilta-Sanomat. Trump has denied all of the previous 11 allegations that have been made against him, but not yet this one. Bustle has reached out to the Trump campaign for comment.

"Before the show we were photographed outside the building," Laaksonen alleged. "Trump stood next to me and suddenly he squeezed my butt. He really grabbed my butt. I don't think anybody saw it, but I flinched and thought, 'What is happening?'"

At the time, Laaksonen was representing Finland in Trump’s Miss Universe pageant, and was appearing on Letterman’s show with Trump and three other women competing. She has not spoken publicly of the incident before, and only did so after Ilta-Slanomet contacted her during a round of interviews with Finnish women who had encounters with Trump.

“Somebody told me there that Trump liked me because I looked like Melania when she was younger,” Laaksonen claimed. “It left me disgusted.”

This isn’t the first Trump controversy related to his time as owner of the Miss Universe pageant. The year before the alleged incident with Laaksonen, Trump told radio shock jock Howard Stern that he would sometimes “go backstage [when] everyone's getting dressed” at the pageant and look at the contestants in various stages of undress.

“No men are anywhere, and I'm allowed to go in because I'm the owner of the pageant and therefore I'm ‘inspecting’ it," Trump explained to Stern in 2005. "They're standing there with no clothes... I sort of get away with things like that.”

In April of this year, 1996 Miss Universe winner Alicia Machado said that Trump referred to her as “Miss Piggy” after she gained weight and “Miss Housekeeping,” presumably because she’s Venezuelan. Trump responded by calling Machado “disgusting” and telling his Twitter followers to “check out” her sex tape, though such a tape does not in fact exist.

Laaksonen is now 30 and runs Ninnin Lifestyle & Living, a clothing and beauty product company, and is the 12th woman to publicly accuse Trump of sexual assault of some form or another. Trump has denied all allegations of sexual assault, called his accusers “horrible, horrible liars,” and pledged to sue them after the presidential election.