The Trump Files: Donald Dumped Wine on an “Unattractive Reporter”

Mother Jones illustration; Shutterstock

The Donald isn’t shy about letting people know he hates them, as many journalists can attest:

“P.S. You are a loser,” Donald Trump wrote in a 2009 letter to Mike Tollin, a filmmaker https://t.co/2yDqXneUJb pic.twitter.com/uwlTPgGBVI

— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 2, 2016

But reporters sometimes get even more than a touching personal note, as Vanity Fair‘s Marie Brenner found out. Brenner profiled Trump for the magazine in 1990, and the mogul hated the piece. “The story was, in fact, one of the worst ever written about me,” he complained in his 1997 book, The Art of the Comeback. He also noted that Brenner was an “unattractive reporter.”

Trump got his revenge, though. Another Trump profile, this one in New York magazine, reported in 1992 that he “boasts about having poured a whole bottle of wine down Marie Brenner’s back after she wrote a story on him that hated.” Trump was still boasting five years later: The New Yorker‘s Mark Singer, who profiled the mogul in 1997, relates in his new book, Trump and Me, that Trump told him he’d gotten even “by pouring red wine down Marie’s dress at a charity dinner.”

This being Trump, the exact details are bit hazy. When the Daily Beast asked Brenner about the incident last year, she had some quibbles. “It wasn’t a bottle, actually—it was a glass,” she said. “I didn’t even notice it was happening, because like everything with Donald, it was a stealth maneuver. It came from behind. It was a black jacket, so I’m still waiting for him to replace it.”