May 3, 2023 -- Donald Trump: lingerie department lurker and pervert

This editor never had an actual personal insight into what sort of vile individual Donald Trump is until I read snippets of the testimony provided in the E. Jean Carroll civil lawsuit case against Trump. Carroll is the former advice columnist for Elle magazine who is suing Trump for defamation after she publicly revealed that Trump raped her in a dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in the mid-1990s. Trump did what he always does when faced by an accuser: he attacked Carroll’s reputation and even her appearance.

Testifying at Carroll’s defamation civil trial in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan, Robert Salerno, the former senior vice president for administration of Bergdorf Goodman, testified that while he had never met either Carroll or Trump, he had seen Trump inside Bergdorf Goodman. Then Salerno dropped a huge bit of news for anyone experienced in department store security, including myself. My first job was at a Pomeroy’s department store in New Jersey [pictured left], where my duties partly included loss prevention security.

Salerno testified that the lingerie department at Bergdorf Goodman was a “destination department,” meaning that anyone who went to the sixth floor, which was lingerie, was there for a specific purpose. Salerno’s statement was that “Bergdorf Goodman wasn't Victoria's Secret, and so if customers went to that section, they were looking for it.” Salerno also testified that when he saw Trump in the store, he was in the “women’s store.” [right]

The evening that Trump allegedly raped Carroll on the sixth floor, she claims that when Trump forced himself on to her, raping her inside a dressing room, he claimed he was at the store to “buy a gift for a female friend.” In many cases when store security was called at Pomeroy’s to deal with or conduct covert surveillance  dubious male shoppers lurking in the lingerie section, we were dealing mostly with “peeping toms” hanging around the dressing rooms or men with lingerie fetishes, including transvestites interested in making personal purchases. Salerno’s recollection that he spotted Trump in the women’s store and his statement that the dressing rooms in lingerie could fit two people strongly suggest that Trump was a sixth floor lurker. Salerno said there were no security cameras installed on the sixth floor in the 1990s, so his recollection about Trump was from memory. It should be recalled that Trump was a well-known face to New Yorkers in the 1990s, so spotting him in the lingerie department would have been the talk of store employees, particularly store detectives.

Lurking around the lingerie department seems par for the course for a sexual predator like Trump. Police blotters around the country contain arrest records for peeping toms caught using their smart phones to photograph women in dressing rooms. We can add Trump to the list of low-lifes arrested for such behavior.

In 2000, Trump and then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani participated in the Mayor’s Inner Circle Press Roast, a skit-based event for charity. A video was shown with Giuliani in drag at Macy's in New York. Trump lunges his face into Giuliani's fake breasts. Giuliani responds by saying, "Oh, you dirty boy, you! . . .I thought you were a gentleman!" Giuliani thought wrong. Gentlemen don't lurk around lingerie departments in department stores.

Although department stores are a dying breed, sexual predators continue to plague lingerie departments. While serving a loosely-supervised prison sentence in the Palm Beach County Stockade from 2008 to 2009 for soliciting a minor for prostitution, Jeffrey Epstein -- Trump's fellow Palm Beach resident and one-time close friend -- was permitted to purchase teen underwear from prison.

In the early 1970s at Pomeroy’s, security and sales personnel who tracked men hanging around the mannequins sporting bras, panties, and girdles called them perverts. They still are and Trump, based on Salerno’s testimony, is definitely among their ranks.

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