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Report from New York Times have it that Rachel Crooks who accused Donald J. Trump during the presidential race of forcibly kissing her at Trump Tower more than a decade ago won an uncontested Democratic primary on Tuesday for a seat in the Ohio State Legislature.
Three weeks before the 2016 presidential election, Rachel Crooks was among several women who came forward to accuse Mr. Trump of sexual misconduct, detailing how she said he grabbed her in 2005 outside an elevator in his Manhattan building and repeatedly kissed her.
But her story did not have a sizable effect on his campaign, a frustrating development that helped spur Ms. Crooks’s political ambitions.
On Tuesday night, Ms. Crooks took a step closer to becoming the first Trump accuser to hold public office, winning an unopposed Democratic primary for an Ohio House of Representatives seat. She is part of a national surge of female political newcomers this year, in both parties and at all levels, who hope to take leading roles in statehouses and in Washington.
Ms. Crooks’s run to represent House District 88, a swath of farmland and manufacturing southeast of Toledo, has garnered particular interest nationwide. Her campaign raised $57,500 leading up to the primary, twice as much as her opponent, with 84 percent of the donations from people who live outside Ohio, according to campaign finance records.
“For others, especially those across the United States, I think they view me running as part of the anti-Trump movement that they want to support,” Ms. Crooks, 35, said in an email on Wednesday.
Her supporters in Ohio, she added, have been motivated a wave of liberal enthusiasm and a desire to elect the first woman to represent the district. “To me, it’s all of these things,” she said.
Yet, Ms. Crooks, an administrator at Heidelberg University in Tiffin, Ohio, enters the general election for District 88 at a disadvantage.
Republican incumbent, Bill Reineke, whom she will face in November, won easily in 2014 and was re-elected in 2016 when he ran unopposed. And Mr. Trump carried the district nearly 26 points over Hillary Clinton in the presidential election.
Ms. Crooks grew up in District 88 in the rural town of Green Springs but moved after college to New York City. When she was a 22-year-old receptionist at Bayrock Group, a real estate investment and development company in Trump Tower, she encountered Mr. Trump outside an elevator one morning in 2005.
She introduced herself and shook his hand. But he would not let go, she said, and started to kiss her cheeks and then her mouth.
“It was so inappropriate,” Ms. Crooks told The New York Times in October 2016. “I was so upset that he thought I was so insignificant that he could do that.”
During campaign stops before the primary, Ms. Crooks spoke about how the 2005 encounter with Mr. Trump had influenced her decision to enter politics but did not define her.
“People in my district are fed up with politics as usual, and ironically, that is what propelled a lot of people to vote for Trump,” she said. “Sadly, many are realizing Trump is a con artist who doesn’t have their interests at heart.”
Culled from: New York Times
