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SALT LAKE CITY — A Utah woman who accused Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump of kissing her without her consent says she won't let him bully her with threats of a lawsuit.
Temple Taggart, who represented Utah as a 21-year-old in the 1997 Miss USA pageant, has retained high-profile attorney Gloria Allred to defend her if Trump sues.
"I am not afraid of you, Mr. Trump," Taggart said at news conference Friday with Allred at her side.
Taggart declared that she won't be silenced and is ready for a battle, but said that there shouldn't be one. Trump, she said, should have the "decency to admit what you did to me, and you should take responsibility for what you have done to other women."
Taggart said her father introduced her to Trump during a pageant rehearsal in Shreveport, Louisiana. She said Trump greeted her with an unsolicited hug and kiss on the lips.
Trump later offered to introduce her to modeling agencies, and during a visit to Trump Tower in Manhattan with two chaperones, he again embraced and kissed her on the lips, Taggart said. She said she felt so uncomfortable that she cut her trip short, bought her own plane ticket home and never spoke to him again.
Trump, who was married to Marla Maples at the time of the alleged encounters, has said he doesn't know who Taggart is and denied kissing her.
Last week, Trump vowed to sue Taggart and other women who have accused him of sexual misconduct the past few weeks.
"Every woman lied when they came forward to hurt my campaign," he said in a speech at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. "Total fabrication. The events never happened. Never. All of these liars will be sued after the election is over."
Allred, who represents four women who have accused Trump of unwelcome sexual advances, is a Democrat and an unabashed supporter of Hillary Clinton for president. But, she said, Taggart is not.
"She's not speaking out to elect Hillary Rodham Clinton to the White House," Allred said.
Taggart said she is a Republican but wishes there was a better candidate. She said she's considering voting for independent candidate Evan McMullin, a Utah native and BYU graduate.
Allred said if Trump becomes president and decides to sue, he would be spending a lot of time in depositions, making it difficult for him to run the country.
Taggart said she posted her experience with Trump on Facebook before he became the GOP nominee just to let her friends know about his character. The New York Times then contacted her and published a story in May.
But Taggart, a mother of three, said she tried to hide from the media after that and didn't do an interview again until the 11-year-old "Access Hollywood" video surfaced in which Trump talks in vulgar terms about how he could approach women he finds attractive.
"I'm automatically attracted to beautiful women — I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet," he says on the video. "Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything."
Taggart, who said she doesn't have a television, said her phone "blew up" with calls. She said her sister sent her a link to the story and told her, "This is why he kissed you." Taggart said the video disturbed her but also made her feel validated.
In a 1997 Deseret News story, Taggart's father, Tag Taggart, gushed about Trump spending more time with his daughter than anybody else at the coronation ball after the pageant.
Trump, who owned the pageant from 1996 to 2015, was among an army of top talent agents from across the nation attempting to attract the attention of the pageant's fourth runner-up, according to the story.
"I was most overwhelmed when Donald Trump came to me. He'd talked with me throughout the week saying he was very impressed with my look,'' Taggart is quoted as saying.
On Friday, Taggart said the 1997 story was "all my dad. Really crazy. All that stuff about Donald Trump all came out of his mouth. None of that was me."
Tag Taggart died in 2014.
Temple Taggart, a Cedar City native, said she was "21 going on 16" at the time and that there was a sense of excitement about the attention the pageant brought. She said she thought the first kiss was how East Coast people greeted each other and let it go. But the second one in New York caused her to wonder about Trump's intentions.
After that, Taggart said she had difficulty with the modeling industry. Taggart moved to the West Coast to model but "freaked out" because she felt like she had to be "forward" to get jobs. She ended up moving back home.
Taggart said she struggled with trusting men and wondering about their intentions because of what happened.
