It was a hot, sticky summer, the way Michael Cohen tells it, not unlike the one the nation is currently pulling itself out of. It was 2012, another election year, and he had taken his family to Bedminster, New Jersey, for a day of playing tennis and hanging by the pool at the club owned by his then boss, Donald Trump. At the time the job perk seemed like a real chit. Cohen was years away from watching the favors he did on behalf of his boss blow up in his face. It was well before he paid a hush money settlement to Stormy Daniels in the run-up to the 2016 election, which ultimately landed him in prison and in front of congressional and criminal investigators. And it was ages before he published a tell-all about his time in Trumpworld, aptly called Disloyal, out this week.
That summer day felt like all the others before it, standing alongside Trump outside the pool area, discussing what Cohen writes was “some pressing business matter, like the size of the breasts of a woman sunbathing on a lounge chair.” Somehow Trump’s attention was diverted to another skirt walking off a tennis court. “Look at that piece of ###,” Cohen recalls Trump saying, as he whistled and pointed. “I would love some of that.” It so happened that Trump was referring to Cohen’s then 15-year-old daughter, Samantha.
Cohen informed Trump of his mistake. “That’s your daughter?” Trump responded. “When did she get so hot?” When Samantha reached her dad, Trump asked her for a kiss on the cheek, before inquiring, “When did you get such a beautiful figure?” and warning her that in a few years, he would be dating one of her friends.
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Emily Jane Fox: The book contains a stunning story about Trump making a comment about how you looked when you were 15.
Samantha Cohen: There are so many creepy men, and it was hardly the first comment like that I’d heard. It was almost meaningless to me at the moment because I’d heard them before. If you can hit on a 15-year-old, I am pretty sure there is something wrong with you, and when you allow someone with that little integrity to be in the most powerful office, that sets the tone for the rest of the country’s culture. ...