Adding to the long list of women who have accused President Donald Trump of sexual assault, Amy Dorris on Thursday alleged that Trump forced his tongue down her throat and groped her at the U.S. Open tennis tournament in New York on September 5, 1997.

In an interview with the Guardian, Dorris accused Trump of assaulting her outside the bathroom in his VIP box at Arthur Ashe Stadium.

"Initially I thought that he was waiting to go to the bathroom, but that wasn't the case, unfortunately," Dorris said. She alleged that Trump forced himself on her after she told him no and that he carelessly continued despite her pleas for him to stop.

"He just shoved his tongue down my throat and I was pushing him off," Dorris told the Guardian. "And then that's when his grip became tighter and his hands were very gropey and all over my butt, my breasts, my back, everything."

"I was pushing his tongue out of my mouth with my teeth," she said. "It was pretty traumatic and jarring and shocking."

"I couldn't get him to let go," Dorris added, saying that she felt "trapped" and likening Trump's inescapable grip to "suction cups on an octopus."

The former model and actress, who was 24 at the time of the alleged assault, described feeling "sick" and "violated" as a result of the encounter with Trump, who was then 51 and married to Marla Maples.

Dorris provided the Guardian with evidence to bolster her account of the alleged incident. The details she shared were also corroborated by numerous individuals with whom she spoke immediately after the event as well as several people she has told in the intervening years, according to the newspaper.

Now 48, Dorris said that she had considered coming forward in 2016 when over a dozen women accused Trump, who was the Republican candidate for president at the time, of sexual misconduct.

Dorris decided against speaking publicly four years ago due to concerns about the potentially negative impacts on her family.

Trump has denied the allegations by Dorris, and his lawyers suggested to the Guardian that Dorris's claims might be politically motivated given the timing.

But Dorris, who first spoke with the Guardian in confidence 15 months ago, provided another explanation for why she recently chose to take the step of going public.

Now that her twin girls "are about to turn 13 years old," Dorris said: "I want them to know that you don't let anybody do anything to you that you don't want. And I'd rather be a role model. I want them to see that I didn't stay quiet, that I stood up to somebody who did something that was unacceptable."

"When you invade someone's space, it doesn't matter if you were raped, it's sexual assault, and it's not okay," she told the Guardian. "You don't touch someone unless they want to be touched. And I did nothing to encourage him to touch me."

"I'm sick of him getting away with this... I'm tired of being quiet," she said. "And I want people to know that this is the man, this is our president. This is the kind of thing he does and it's unacceptable," she said.

Republished from Common Dreams (Kenny Stancil, staff writer) under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.