A new set of allegations involving Donald Trump has surfaced, and this time, it involves an act that allegedly occurred on the Celebrity Apprentice set against a show staffer. According to the Daily Beast, five staffers on the show have reported the same disturbing incident where Trump allegedly “laughed off” groping behavior of Gary Busey during his stint on the show:
Multiple Apprentice employees, including the alleged victim herself, told The Daily Beast that the Academy-Award-nominated actor “grabbed” one of their colleagues “firmly between [the] legs” during the 2011 season of Celebrity Apprentice. Busey also forcibly put the female staffer’s hand on the crotch of his pants. The alleged incident, which they say took place during a location shoot in SoHo in New York City, prompted a firestorm among members of the Apprentice crew.
The five sources all told The Beast their accounts of what happened during the alleged incident. The victim claims Busey grabbed her during an on-set break. All five of the staffers have spoken on condition of anonymity, as they are bound by NBC-associated non-disclosure agreements. The victim revealed her version of events to The Beast:
“We were smoking cigarettes outside, and Busey was standing next to me. And then at one point, he grabbed me firmly between my legs, and ran his hand up my stomach, and grabbed my breasts,” she continued. “I didn’t know what to do. So I made this joke that, ‘Oh, I’ve never been sexually harassed by a celebrity before!’ Then he grabbed my hand and put it [over] his penis, and said, like, ‘I’m just getting started, baby.'”
The victim adds that her friend intervened and “put his hand on Busey’s chest.” One of the victim’s colleagues told The Beast, “There was a moment where [Busey] basically grabbed her t*ts, and grabbed her hand [and] put it on his package there.” This staffer confirmed the victim’s account of how a friend had to intervene and push Busey away. To make matters worse, Donald Trump reportedly didn’t take the matter seriously when it was brought to his attention, although he went through the motions of disciplining Busey in a joking manner:
“This was brought to Trump’s attention later, and there was something when he questioned Busey in the boardroom about it, and the resolution was Trump saying, ‘Keep your hands to yourself,'” a former staffer, who heard their conversation as it took place, said.
“Gary, did you do a bad thing … [and] got your hands where they’re not supposed to be,” the Apprentice staff member recalls Trump as saying, noting that the two of them were “yucking” it up as Trump was supposedly disciplining him. Another staffer recalled Trump calling Busey a “bad boy, a very bad boy.”
“Trump knew, he definitely knew,” another Apprentice staffer said. “I was in the control room when that happened.”
Busey’s manager, Ron Sampson, strenuously denied these allegations to The Beast. Further, he states that he’s “extremely fed up” with being noted as a Trump supporter or endorser and says neither is the case.
Donald Trump has recently been the subject of a wave of allegations concerning his own behavior over the decades. Several women have accused him of groping and otherwise inappropriately touching them without their permission. This followed Trump’s assertion that he’d never acted out any of the sexual harassment behaviors that he bragged about during a 2005 discussion with Billy Bush.
(Via Daily Beast)
