Former US president George H.W. Bush is facing new allegations from a Michigan woman who said he touched her inappropriately while he was in office at an event in April 1992.
The woman, now 55, spoke exclusively with CNN and said she was attending a fundraiser for Bush’s re-election campaign in Dearborn, Michigan, with her father when the president grabbed her rear end during a photo-op.
“We got closer together for a family photo and it was like ‘Holy crap!’” she said, describing the moment Bush touched her buttocks. “It was like a gentle squeeze.”
Her story —remarkably similar to the accounts shared by at least six other women who said the former president groped them during photo-ops between 2003 and 2016— is significant, because it is the first time a woman has come forward to accuse Bush of unwanted touching while he was in office.
“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.” Actress Heather Lind, who appeared in the AMC series “Turn: Washington’s Spies,” wrote in October that Bush touched her inappropriately a few years ago as they were posing for a photograph, and while she did not get into the specifics of the incident, she referred to it as a sexual assault.
Best-selling author Christina Baker Kline wrote in Slate in October about being groped by the former president in April 2014 when she was invited to Houston as a guest author for the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy fundraiser.
“It doesn’t happen in a vacuum,” she said. “Not every man does this, but if he does it, he usually does it more than once. Someone doesn’t just grab a woman’s butt out of the blue that hasn’t done it before.”
