Voters Are Discovering What One BBC Journalist Learned Decades Ago: Donald Trump Is a Sexist Bully
She calls him the “comb-over creep.”
Selina Scott, the British journalist who rose to fame co-hosting BBC’s morning show in the 1980s, has a history with Republican front-runner Donald Trump. In 1995, the blond, blue-eyed Scott — once voted Great Britain’s sexiest woman on television — sought to chronicle the business mogul’s career in a 60-minute documentary. It was a venture that began with mutual flattery and ended, as Scott puts it, in “bitterness, recrimination, and intimidating letters.”
Watching the 2016 presidential race unfold from across the pond, Scott says she understands well Trump’s pattern of bullying journalists and women. Her own encounters with the real-estate mogul decades ago revealed, she recently said, the thin-skinned man underneath the bluster and bombast that voters are now seeing on the campaign trail.
Writing in Britain’s Daily Mail on January 31, Scott asserted that the “key to understanding Trump is in his attitude to women.” While filming, he introduced Scott to his mother, Mary, and his then-wife, Marla. “While it would be wrong to say [Marla] appeared cowed by Trump, she was silent and submissive,” Scott recalled, suggesting that it’s therefore no surprise Trump hasn’t taken kindly to the assertive women he’s encountered in his public life.
Watching Trump berate Fox News’s Megyn Kelly throughout the campaign season, Scott decided to speak up once again, placing her own story in the context of Trump’s behavior on the trail. “Kelly . . . discovered,” as Scott herself did years ago, that “the oily smile is replaced with a deep well of hate if he feels he has not emotionally seduced you.”
‘The oily smile is replaced with a deep well of hate if he feels he has not emotionally seduced you.’
— Selina Scott
Trump has been dogged by allegations of sexism on the campaign trail. One of the earliest moments came after the first GOP debate in August, when he said that moderator Kelly had “blood coming out of her eyes, coming out of her wherever.” Later, in an interview with Rolling Stone, he made clear that he found Carly Fiorina’s face objectionable. Scott’s story, documented in Michael D’Antonio’s biography of Trump, Never Enough, suggests that such news-generating outbursts are not novel eruptions but distinctly Trump-brand behavior. And with Trump’s massive fan base across multiple media platforms, that old-school bullying goes quickly from one pile-on to a mob-style offense, where verbal harassment and even death threats follow in short order.
“I know,” Scott wrote. “I’ve been there.”
#share#What went so wrong in their relationship? Trump was making assertions that didn’t stand up to scrutiny — a habit his critics still recognize today. In her documentary, Scott packaged together moments when Trump walked back bombastic claims about his wealth; the film punctured those claims one after another.
Scott spent two weeks with Trump helicoptering over Manhattan and jetting to his Palm Beach estate. Trump later remarked that Scott’s beauty and charm made it impossible for him not to open up.
For Scott, the ordeal highlights the character assassination that follows when Trump doesn’t get what he wants.
They flirted. At first, en route to Florida, it was innocent and mutual. Scott’s producer, Ted Brocklebank, told D’Antonio that Scott was adept at launching her own charm offensive. “She came over as very innocent and flickered her eyelashes,” he recounted. The banter ended after their plane touched down and the two sat for their first formal interview. Then, Scott leveled pointed questions at Trump for ridiculing Barbara Walters as a “disloyal lady” and pressed him for specifics on the extent of his personal wealth. While Trump did not lash out at the time, he did not offer Scott and her team a ride back to Manhattan.
In one scene in the film, Scott recounts a helicopter ride the two took over Manhattan. Trump pointed to the Empire State Building, telling Scott he owned “100 percent of it.”
“Later, forgetting he had told me he wholly owned the building, he said he only owned 50 percent of it, which he then considerably reduced,” Scott noted in the Daily Mail. “It was the same story with the Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City. ‘It’s wholly owned by me,’ he said.” She continued to press him as he rolled back the claim from 80 percent to, finally, 50 percent ownership.
She assembled that collection of scenes in her documentary, pairing it with the Porgy and Bess opera score, “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”
After the piece aired, Trump erupted in a manner now familiar to many American voters: “Over many years he sent me a series of intimidating letters branding me ‘sleazy, unattractive, obnoxious, and boring.’”
“Selina, you are a major loser,” one read. Another, as D’Antonio reported in his biography, fumed: “Selina, you have little talent. . . . You are no longer ‘hot.’ . . . I hope you are able to solve your problems before it is too late.’”
The flurry of mail stopped when Scott threatened legal action. But the dust-up led ITV, Scott’s network, to shelve the film after it was aired only once, according to D’Antonio.
#related#For Scott, the ordeal highlights the character assassination that follows when Trump doesn’t get what he wants. Scott’s documentary, including its unused footage, emerged from the dust earlier this year when purchased by NBC.
But that singular showing two decades ago didn’t go unnoticed. Scott told D’Antonio that her friend Princess Diana gave her a call following its broadcast. Diana asked about Trump. He had just sent her multiple bouquets of flowers. (Not two months after Diana’s death, in an interview with Roger Stone, Trump said he regretted never having asked the princess for a date. “I always have a shot,” he said.)
Over the phone that day, as Diana surveyed the flowers, the princess told Scott, “‘He gives me the creeps.’”
Said Scott: “I told her to bin the whole lot.”
— Elaina Plott is a William F. Buckley Fellow in Political Journalism at the National Review Institute.