Trump comments prompt congresswoman to share assault story

CONCORD, N.H. – U.S. Rep. Annie Kuster doesn’t doubt that Donald Trump used his fame to force himself on women with neither consent nor consequences. She says she experienced just that with a celebrity surgeon who assaulted her decades ago when she was a young staffer on Capitol Hill.

Kuster briefly described the incident last summer during a House floor speech about campus sexual assault. But it wasn’t until the recent publication of Trump’s sexually predatory comments that she publicly named the man she says assaulted her: Christiaan Barnard, who performed the world’s first human heart transplant in 1967 and died in 2001.

Kuster says she was 23 when Barnard reached under her skirt at a lunch meeting in Washington.

She says she is telling her story because it’s all too common.