June 28, 2016

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

“I didn’t even notice it was happening, because like everything with Donald, it was a stealth maneuver.”

Mother Jones illustration; Shutterstock

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

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.”

Read the rest of “The Trump Files”:

 

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FACT:

Mother Jones was founded as a nonprofit in 1976 because we knew corporations and the wealthy wouldn't fund the type of hard-hitting journalism we set out to do.

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2020 demands.

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