The making of the Creep in Chief

Hachette Books

Monique El-Faizy:

To me, that was the unexpected power of the book. We’ve all heard the stories, the women would come forward one by one. But when you put it all in one space, first of all, it’s enormous, and that’s shocking in and of itself, but these patterns really do emerge. [Trump] clearly has a thing for younger women. He started talking about Ivanka being sexy when she was around the same age as these models that he was kind of staring at backstage and pursuing at parties. So that’s one of the patterns.

He likes porn stars, as we’ve seen throughout his life. And he has these habits. He’ll push somebody against the wall and try and kiss them. He’ll grab a breast or a buttock. When he’s in a property that he owns, whether it be a hotel or Mar-a-Lago, he feels that he has the right to walk in on a woman in her room.

What’s interesting is that there were very few one-offs. We only put things in [the book] that fit the pattern, because he has such well-established patterns over the years. 

What was powerful about that is, when we would interview the women, almost all of them in some way blamed themselves: “What kind of vibe was I putting off? What was I wearing?” And when you look at them in the context of these patterns, you realize it has almost nothing to do with that woman. If it wasn’t that woman, it would’ve been another woman wearing something else and putting off a totally different vibe.

Barry Levine:

About six months into the reporting, we were getting all these new stories, in addition to cataloging the earlier allegations that were made in 2016. And at the same time, I was also digging into research and finding stories about [Trump’s] inappropriate behavior with women that had popped up in the media but had never really been cataloged ― everything from making horrible comments to a model that was seated at a table with Graydon Carter, to incidents where he himself said that he attacked women, [like] pouring a glass of wine on a reporter in New York.

To me, [these incidents] all needed to be cataloged. I think it’s very powerful, after you go through the beautifully shaped narrative that Monique wrote, that you then get, in very black and white fashion, every single allegation of inappropriate behavior, in addition to the disparaging comments that I found he made involving so many women. 

I just think when you read them one after another, it is extremely impactful. And so the appendix of this book, to me, is as important as the narrative itself...