Another groping allegation has emerged against former President George H.W. Bush; this time he can’t play the senile old man card because it allegedly happened during the election campaign of 1992.
In an interview with CNN, the woman, who asked she not be named for fear of excessive media attention, said that while attending a fundraiser for Bush’s re-election campaign in Dearborn, Michigan, the former president grabbed her rear during a photo-op.
“We got closer together for a family photo and it was like ‘Holy crap!'” she said, describing the moment. “It was like a gentle squeeze.”
The woman claimed that she initially rationalized it off as an “accident” considering that they were bunching close for the photo. Her rationalization changed, however, as more women stepped forward in recent days to accuse him of similar behavior. Bush’s spokesman Jim McGrath has deflected the accusations by saying H.W.’s Parkinson’s and confinement to a wheelchair left him without proper faculties.
“All the focus has been on ‘He’s old.’ OK, but he wasn’t old when it happened to me,” she told CNN. “I’ve been debating what to do about it.”
The previous accusations against Bush, one involving a 16-year-old girl, stem from 2003 to the present. This latest accusation marks the first one leveled against the former-president while he was serving in office.
CNN spoke with the woman’s ex-husband, who corroborated her account of what happened.
“I remember her coming home and her saying he (Bush) said (to her father), ‘Is that your daughter?’ or ‘Who’s that with you?’ and her dad said, ‘It’s my daughter,’ and he said, ‘Well, get her in the picture,'” the woman’s ex-husband said. “She tried to write it off as ‘move in closer’ — but no, it wasn’t. The hand definitely was across the butt. It wasn’t across the waist.”
Bush spokesman Jim McGrath declined to comment on this allegation, which comes just one week after Roslyn Corrigan told TIME Magazine about her meeting with H.W. back in 2003 turned sour when he pinched her butt while also posing for a photo.
“As soon as the picture was being snapped on the one-two-three he dropped his hands from my waist down to my buttocks and gave it a nice, ripe squeeze, which would account for the fact that in the photograph my mouth is hanging wide open,” Corrigan told TIME. “I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, what just happened?'”
