Supported by
Jessica Bennett
They Call Themselves the ‘Strange Sorority.’ Trump Was Their Initiation.
Ms. Bennett is a contributing editor in Opinion, where she writes on gender, politics and the way we live today. She reported from Chicago and New York.
In Natasha Stoynoff’s fantasy, the women who have accused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct finally get to confront him. The details of the scenario change a bit, depending on how she tells it, but a few things remain consistent.
E. Jean Carroll, the former gonzo journalist who won millions of dollars in court after Mr. Trump denied assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room, leads the questioning. Ms. Stoynoff, a sturdy Slavic blonde and trained boxer, who in real life is far too Canadian to intimidate anyone, makes sure his attention does not stray. Maybe Jill Harth, a makeup artist who sued Mr. Trump for sexual harassment and attempted rape, is there, too, shaking her head over the too-orange foundation she used to chide him about.
The women are not looking for revenge, exactly. They simply want an acknowledgment and an apology. An admission, from the man himself, that they aren’t crazy or hysterical or gold diggers or liars, that he really did what they say he did to them, even as he told the world they were too old, too ugly, too haggard to possibly be his type.
In the fantasy, which Ms. Stoynoff is narrating to me as she nervously paces, Mr. Trump admits that he sexually abused each of the women and agrees never to run for elected office again.
“If only,” Ms. Stoynoff says.
We are sitting on the porch of an old Victorian home in a suburb of Chicago, just a few miles from the Democratic National Convention. Ms. Stoynoff is preparing to record a video that is probably the closest thing to a confrontation she’s going to get.
In it, she will recount the day in 2005 when she says Donald Trump assaulted her. She was on assignment from People magazine to write about his wedding anniversary. She says a seven-months-pregnant Melania Trump was upstairs changing. “You know my one regret,” she tells me, somewhat tentatively, feigning a punch with her right arm, “is that I didn’t deck him.”
Hear the ‘Strange Sorority’ in their own words: Natasha Stoynoff
The video Ms. Stoynoff records will eventually be cut into a 60-second ad spot aimed at influencing swing-state voters, independents and, in particular, women. But it will also target Mr. Trump himself: In addition to airing nationally on a handful of networks, including CNN and MSNBC, the ad will appear on the Golf Channel and Fox News, specifically in the markets surrounding Mr. Trump’s homes in Palm Beach, Fla., and Bedminster, N.J.
Ms. Stoynoff has written about what she says happened to her. She has been asked about it repeatedly by fellow journalists and testified to it under oath during Ms. Carroll’s civil trial against Mr. Trump. And yet as I speak with her that day on the porch, she is nervous.
Karena Virginia, a yoga instructor (who accused Mr. Trump of groping her at the U.S. Open in 1998), was supposed to be there with her and had even traveled to Chicago but backed out that morning. Alva Johnson, a former human resources executive and event planner who worked for Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign (and has accused him of kissing her on the job), was also in Chicago, but the video’s backers decided that her story, which involved a lawsuit and arbitration over a nondisclosure agreement, was too complicated to get across in that short format. Jessica Leeds, a retired stockbroker (who accused Mr. Trump of molesting her on a plane in the late 1970s), had wanted to come, but at 82, she didn’t feel up to the trip; she would record her portion of the video separately.
And so the whole women-banding-together-to-confront-their-attacker fantasy was going to consist solely of Ms. Stoynoff, pleading with America to hear her. She takes a sip of coffee, black, clears her throat and begins to tell her story again. Her voice shaky, her eyes periodically tearing up, she looks less like a woman seeking vengeance than one issuing a lonely plea: Remember us? Remember what he did? We’re still here.
A Strange Sorority
Depending on how you count them, 19 or 26 or 67 women have accused Mr. Trump of sexual misconduct. Women who have said he “squeezed my butt,” “eyed me like a piece of meat,” “stuck his hand up my skirt,” “thrust his genitals,” “forced his tongue in my mouth,” was “rummaging around my vagina,” and so on.
Mr. Trump has denied any misconduct. He, in turn, has accused the women of being “political operatives,” plotting a “conspiracy against you, the American people,” looking for their “10 minutes of fame” and not being his “type.”
“It couldn’t have happened, it didn’t happen,” Mr. Trump sneered during a recent news conference, referring to Ms. Leeds, the one who accused him of assaulting her on an airplane. “And she would not have been the chosen one.”
Jessica Leeds: ‘There was an awful lot of ridiculous things that happened’
These women have all seen their stories become political footballs. They have all received death threats. Several have had to explain to their kids why classmates were calling Mom a liar and a whore. They have bonded over lost income, lost friends, similarities in their situations — Wait, he groped you at the U.S. Open, too? — and the way that “Trump accuser” has become an inextricable part of their identities. The women have gotten used to having their motives questioned by strangers and pundits, but sometimes also by the people they love: This wasn’t Cosby-level abuse. Why can’t you just get over it? Move on?
So about five years ago, toward the end of Mr. Trump’s presidency, 10 of these women formed a little club of sorts, a sisterhood meets therapy circle meets support group — one with a hideous initiation. They called it the Strange Sorority.
By then, some of the women had met: They’d sat for news conferences and spoken at the Women’s March; a handful had taken part in a theater production called “The Pussy Grabber Plays” and gathered for the premiere. During the pandemic, Ms. Stoynoff began organizing video chats for the larger group to stay in touch — they were spread out, from California to Canada to the Carolinas — including one to watch the inauguration of Joe Biden.
I wrote about that meeting at the time, and we kept in contact. Ms. Johnson, the former Trump campaign aide who was still embroiled in arbitration with him, lit her “Trump 2016” business card on fire on the chat while sipping champagne. Rachel Crooks, who accused Mr. Trump of forcibly kissing her in Trump Tower and had gone on to run for elected office in Ohio, read a poem she had written called “Bye-Don.” The group discussed dreams of meeting in Tahiti when it was all over.
“I’m giddy,” Ms. Stoynoff said as Mr. Biden was sworn in. “I’m a combination of numb and giddy.” For a moment, anyway, it felt as if they — and America — had cast off this man for good.
But there is no such thing as closure when it comes to Donald Trump. You can spend thousands on therapy, you can sue him, move out of the country (Ms. Stoynoff now lives in Quebec), set up a boxing gym in your house to release your rage or install security around its perimeter because you are worried about his supporters. And yet the lack of any reflection or penance by him and the fact that he seems so threaded into the fabric of our country — well, there’s no escaping him. Especially not now that he might be president again.
But if the group had started out as a space to vent or share or support or even sometimes laugh at the absurdity of it all — as when Ms. Johnson realized her new apartment overlooked a Trump property or Amy Dorris got invited to a charity event at Mar-a-Lago — what they’ve found themselves talking about of late is not so much their own lives but the country’s political life. In particular, how remarkably uninterested everyone seems, this time around, in the possibility that Donald Trump is a sexual predator.
And look, they know there’s a lot going on in the world: There are felonies to contend with, the end of Roe v. Wade, wars in Gaza and Ukraine — not to mention the “more extreme” cases, as Ms. Stoynoff put it, like Harvey Weinstein and Sean Combs.
Kristin Anderson: ‘You have to find a way to laugh’
But these women can’t help feeling that the world has forgotten about them. Even the Democrats are trying to move away from all that negativity.
“Do you think someone will bring up the women?” Ms. Stoynoff texted to the group during the debate between Kamala Harris and Mr. Trump.
“I hope so,” Ms. Virginia replied, to thumbs-up and heart emojis.
Lost in the Noise
It wasn’t always like this. Around the 2016 election, shortly after the “Access Hollywood” tape surfaced, when it felt as if new women were coming forward by the day, it seemed that their stories might matter. Members of Mr. Trump’s own party were calling for him to drop out of the race. His daughter avoided defending him on the campaign trail. In a poll conducted a few weeks before the election, more than seven in 10 Americans — including 42 percent of Republican voters — said they believed the women.
Then something peculiar happened. The words “another new accuser” began to sound like background noise. The women’s names — Kristin Anderson (who said Mr. Trump stuck his hand up her skirt at a nightclub), Samantha Holvey (who said Mr. Trump leered at her while she was changing in a pageant dressing room) — became numbers (“11th accuser,” “13th accuser”) and then the numbers started to get confusing. Did it count as abuse if he was merely ogling? How was the public supposed to understand whether stories were corroborated by journalists, by lawyers or by nobody at all?
Samantha Holvey: ‘I knew it was going to be hard’
Narratives move in strange ways, particularly when it comes to sexual assault and particularly when it comes to Mr. Trump, who has changed the very nature of how we perceive truth. What makes a story credible enough to be believable or simple enough to stick in voters’ minds? How do you achieve those things when up against a man whose scandals are too numerous to commit to memory, too frequent to keep our focus for very long?
Arguably, the women laid the groundwork for the #MeToo movement that would follow. But by the time that came along, it felt a bit as though the world had moved on. There were charges against Mr. Weinstein, a public grilling of Brett Kavanaugh. Even as more of them, including Ms. Johnson, Ms. Dorris and Ms. Carroll, came forward — with Ms. Carroll lodging the most serious accusation, of rape — Mr. Trump was president, and there was so much else to think about. And so their stories receded, the outrage subsided, and they tried to move on with their lives, at least for a little while.
Alva Johnson: ‘It was old news’
It’s not that members of the Strange Sorority want to be remembered, exactly. But they want their stories to be remembered.
When I checked in with the women late last year, it turned out that they were thinking about a cross-country bus tour — a kind of “Partridge Family” meets “Girls on the Bus” in which the women would travel to swing states, talk to voters, tell their stories, try to connect, in particular, with Republican women.
They first had the idea in 2020, but then Covid derailed their plans. Now the group included Ms. Johnson, whose old job as a Trump campaign strategist at one point entailed sending R.V.s with Mr. Trump’s face on them to 58 counties in Florida. So in early summer, Ms. Johnson began scouting.
She went to a bus depot in Queens to tour vehicles and mapped routes across the swing states, along with drive times, spots they could stop for lunch (the Busy Bee in Atlanta, Pat’s for cheesesteaks in Philly) and hotel chains where they could use points. They were figuring out dates, whom they would invite (did it make sense to include the Weinstein or Cosby women? Anita Hill?), whether they’d do a news conference at each stop, what they would wear. At one point, Ms. Stoynoff suggested they dress like the Guardian Angels; Ms. Anderson proposed self-defense lessons at each stop. They were excited and the ideas were flowing; it felt like something the group was doing together — and that might matter.
But then came Mr. Biden’s disastrous performance in the presidential debate and calls for him to step down. Then the (first) assassination attempt happened. The bus plan was put on hold indefinitely.
They thought about showing up at the Republican National Convention, but that seemed like a big risk with little reward. They brainstormed erecting billboards around the vicinity — with text that said something like “I won’t vote for an adjudicated rapist” and a hotline other victims could call — but billboards were hard to produce. Time was running out.
Enter George Conway. Yes, that George Conway: professional Trump loather, ex of the Trump mouthpiece Kellyanne Conway and perhaps the most visible Never Trump conservative around.
Mr. Conway wears many hats: attorney, political strategist, co-founder of the Lincoln Project. But he is also a man with a penchant for stirring up political trouble, particularly at the intersection of women, sex and power.
It was Mr. Conway who, in the 1990s, worked behind the scenes on behalf of Paula Jones when she accused Bill Clinton of sexual harassment. It was Mr. Conway who helped set up Monica Lewinsky’s confidante, Linda Tripp, with a lawyer and who allegedly leaked details to the press about the shape of the president’s penis. It was Mr. Conway who introduced Ms. Carroll to her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, after meeting Ms. Carroll at a party, and it was Mr. Conway whom Ms. Stoynoff cold emailed in 2019, thanking him for “fighting for us” on his Twitter page.
Initially Mr. Conway and then his Anti-Psychopath Political Action Committee agreed to fund the bus tour. Later, he suggested flying the women to one of the debates — mimicking the way Mr. Trump trotted out Juanita Broaddrick to rattle Hillary Clinton in 2016. That would have been kind of a fun idea, but after Mr. Biden pulled out, the debate was rescheduled without an audience. So they landed on the idea of recording videos — and the natural place to shoot them seemed to be the Democratic National Convention, where Mr. Conway would be already.
When Ms. Stoynoff first told me about this plan, I felt protective of her. Mr. Conway talked a good game: “The ideal outcome is to get people remembering, ‘Oh, my God, there were these women,’” he told me, but he had his own agenda — drawing attention to himself and his cause.
So far, his new PAC’s endeavors have involved disseminating graphics of the diagnostic criteria for “narcissistic personality disorder,” paying for mobile billboards reading, “Thanks for nominating a psycho,” outside the Republican convention and ads mocking Mr. Trump’s crowd sizes. All clever but not exactly in line with the women’s desire to be taken seriously.
The goal is to get Mr. Trump to react, Mr. Conway said, to trigger him, so to speak, into lashing out — a tactic not dissimilar to what Ms. Harris did in their debate. There may indeed be political wisdom in that. And yet I was struggling not to feel as if he had stepped in to direct these women as much for his ends as theirs.
Will Anyone Listen?
The night before the video taping, Ms. Stoynoff and I went to the Democratic National Convention, where we watched the speeches from a private box. (She drew from her years as a celebrity party reporter to sneak me in through a side door.) I was curious if she and Ms. Virginia might be recognized among the political elite, but I needn’t have wondered. Ms. Harris did refer in passing to the fact that a jury sided with Ms. Carroll in her lawsuit against Mr. Trump. But in general, Democrats were telling the nation what they cared about most, and it was not the women of the Strange Sorority.
Natasha Stoynoff: ‘We band together’
Mr. Conway was two hours late for the video shoot. Ms. Stoynoff’s eyes were swelling from the hair spray a makeup artist had applied. The owners of the house where the production was taking place — a day rental in a neighboring suburb — were walking in and out with their dogs. Not exactly ideal ambience to recount your story of sexual trauma.
“I’m already emotional. I can’t believe this,” Ms. Stoynoff says, moments after sitting down.
When I see a rough cut, I am relieved: It is moving, even after all this time, to hear her tell her story out loud. And Mr. Conway has been edited out. The video will air through the end of October — however often half a million dollars in ad buys will get you — and, of course, on social media.
The ad went live this past Wednesday. It got some press and some attention on social media and is scheduled to run on NewsNation during next week’s vice-presidential debate. But will it matter?
Part of me wonders if the women could have saved a whole lot of money, and grief, by simply cutting together old news footage; after all, they had been telling their stories for years now. Or getting some youthful TikToker — maybe Mr. Conway’s influencer daughter, Claudia Conway, knew someone? — to make a viral mash-up, intended for first-time voters who legitimately may not know this history. Even then, would anything move the needle? The country has had eight years to come to terms with Donald Trump, with who he is and what he does. Is anyone really on the fence?
I ask Ms. Stoynoff if it feels sometimes that she is shouting into a void. “None of us thought we’d still be talking about this after so many years,” she replies. “We thought he’d be gone.”
But what else can she do, really, other than try? “We feel like, ‘One more time, and this should do it,’ but so far, it never does it,” Ms. Stoynoff says. “Maybe this will be the one.”
Source photographs by Alex Wong and Stephanie Keith/Getty Images; Eve Edelheit, Sarah Blesener, Sarah Blesener and Sam Hodgson for The New York Times; David Dee Delgado/Reuters.
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Jessica Bennett is a contributing editor in the Opinion section of The Times. She teaches journalism at New York University and is the author of “Feminist Fight Club” and “This Is 18.” @jessicabennett • Facebook
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