"Why doesn't some woman say what they say about me about (Obama)?" Donald Trump asked at a campaign rally Friday, bewailing the clear unfairness of the way the universe is treating him.
Why indeed. It's one of the great unanswered questions of the cosmos.
At that rally, Trump also continued to defend himself against charges of sexual misconduct raised by a growing number of women on the grounds that his accusers are too ugly to have deserved his groping. And he admits to having checked out Hillary Clinton from behind during their recent town hall debate, reporting "I was not impressed."
Most importantly, his campaign finally released the evidence of Trump's innocence that it had promised earlier in the week. It comes in the form of an eyewitness who says he can refute charges that Trump groped and assaulted a woman who sat next to him on a plane around 1980.
According to Anthony Gilberthorpe, a British citizen, he sat across from Trump and his accuser, Jessica Leeds, on that flight some 36 years ago and had his eye on them the entire time. Gilberthorpe, who would have been around 18 at the time, reports that Trump acted as the perfect gentleman, and in fact was forced to fend off unwanted sexual advances from Leeds.
"She wanted to marry him," Gilberthorpe claims.
It didn't take reporters more than few minutes to discover that Gilberthorpe was at one point a minor British political figure himself, with a colorful history. In 2014, he came forward to claim in the British tabloid press that in the late '70s and early '80s, he had supplied underage boys to British politicians for sex and drug parties. He got a lot of attention for that claim, but no evidence has surfaced to substantiate it.
In a separate case, Gilberthorpe has been identified by a British politician as the person who was paid 25,000 pounds by a tabloid to arrange an encounter with a 17-year-old prostitute. The hotel room was equipped with secret video cameras, and it destroyed the man's career.
In yet another misadventure, Gilberthorpe announced to a local newspaper in 1987 that he was engaged to marry a young American fashion designer, Leah Bergdorf-Hunt. Apparently, it was front-page news at the time. "Both our families are delighted ... I hope this explains to a few people about my frequent trips to America," Gilberthorpe said.
Later investigation proved that there was no engagement, and also no person by the name of Leah Bergdorf-Hunt. Both were invented by Gilberthorpe.
Around that same time, Gilberthorpe filed a libel suit against British papers that had reported that he was gay. The reporter who wrote the story claimed to have an impeccable source for that information, which was Gilberthorpe himself. The lawsuit was initially successful, but was later overturned. According to the British press at the time, "three judges ordered a retrial after being presented with 'credible if not incontrovertible' evidence that Gilberthorpe had lied in court and was, in fact, promiscuously homosexual."
Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's not the sex, it's the lying about the sex, right?
Given all that, you have to wonder whether Trump is right: Maybe the universe really is aligned against him. Because what are the odds that the man who just happened to sit across from Trump and Leeds on the night of their confrontation, giving Trump the perfect alibi, would also turn out to be this Forrest Gump of sexual misconduct, as some describe him?
It's either a cosmic joke on poor Donald, or it's the product of a desperate and immensely incompetent campaign operation that makes itself look even more ridiculous by trotting out people like this as a character witness.
In fact, Gilberthorpe has now released yet another videotape, which he claims to be a behind-the-scenes look at how the Trump opposition research team conducts its business. If accurate, it explains an awful lot:
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