On Friday, undermining an earlier (and absolutely unconvincing) defense that his behavior could somehow be excused because of his age or the Parkinson’s disease from which he suffers, a fourth woman has come out to accuse former President George H. W. Bush of groping her—years before his illness placed him in a wheelchair.
The latest woman to accuse Bush, Amanda Staples, published a post to her Instagram account in which she recounted the behavior of the former president in 2006 when she was running as a Republican state senate candidate in Maine, where the 41st president lives most of the year. Just 29-years-old at the time, Staples was posing for a picture, she explained in the post, when he “grabbed my butt and joked saying ‘Oh, I’m not THAT President.'”
As the local Bangor Daily News reports, this latest accusation, which follows testimony by three different women who shared similar stories, “pokes a hole in Bush’s initial explanation for the behavior, as a spokesman said that because he’s been wheelchair-bound for five years, his arm ‘naturally falls on the lower waist of the people with whom he takes pictures.'”
Earlier accusations by the three other women—Heather Lind, Jordana Grolnik, and Christina Baker Kline—included a joke that Bush apparently likes to deploy while making his unwanted advances. “Do you know who my favorite magician is?” the president would reportedly ask. “David Cop-A-Feel.”
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