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Trump Comments Prompt Kuster to Share Assault Story

Allegra Boverman

 

U.S. Rep. Annie Kuster doesn't doubt that Donald Trump used his fame to force himself on women with neither consent nor consequences. She says she experienced just that with a celebrity surgeon who assaulted her decades ago when she was a young staffer on Capitol Hill.

Kuster briefly described the incident last summer during a House floor speech about campus sexual assault. But it wasn't until the recent publication of Trump's sexually predatory comments that she publicly named the man she says assaulted her: Christiaan Barnard, who performed the world's first human heart transplant in 1967 and died in 2001.

Kuster says she was 23 when Barnard reached under her skirt at a lunch meeting in Washington.

She says she is telling her story because it's all too common.

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