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'There Was No Way to Stop Him,' Says Woman Groped at Trump Tower Protest

By Maya Rajamani | October 24, 2016 5:50pm | Updated on October 25, 2016 12:08pm
 A photo of Gabriella Geisinger, 27, taken at the protest on Oct. 19.
A photo of Gabriella Geisinger, 27, taken at the protest on Oct. 19.
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Joseph Kepferle

MIDTOWN — The woman groped at a rally outside Trump Towers last week was "shocked and incensed" by the incident — but nonetheless stayed for nearly two hours after to support two friends she'd promised to look out for.

Freelance writer Gabriella Geisinger, 27, had been protesting with a group of women at an anti-Trump rally in front of the Fifth Avenue high-rise on Oct. 19 when a man in a blue button-down shirt and glasses grabbed her breast over a barricade set up to fence in protesters before running off, she told DNAinfo New York.

The man walked back and forth past her group reading their signs in silence for nearly 10 minutes prior to the incident, she said.

“The women around me were as equally shocked and incensed and angry as I was,” she said, adding that the man — who she described as about 5-foot-10, with an average build and brown hair — "squeezed hard" before walking off. 

“It was kind of unfortunate that there was this barricade there, because none of us could get to him, so there was no way to stop him from leaving.”

Geisinger said the first police officer she approached about the incident did nothing.

“I called out and said to the police officer, ‘Excuse me, I’ve just been groped — are you going to do anything about it?’” she recalled. “The police officer shook his head and walked away.”

The second officer she approached took her statement, she said.

“Initially, they wanted to take me to the precinct straight away, but I wanted to stay,” she said. “I was there with two of my friends who’d never been to a protest… and I’d specifically told them I’d look out for them, and that we’d stay together.”

After protesting for nearly two hours following the groping, Geisinger went to the precinct with three officers to file a full report, before traveling uptown to the NYPD's Special Victims Unit, she said.

A female detective there suggested the man might have been "challenging" her, "because of what [her] sign said," Geisinger said.

At the protest, she carried a sign that read, "Just because I move through public space does not mean my body is public space."

"I hadn't really put two and two together — I guess he could have been," she said.

The lifelong New Yorker, who grew up in Greenwich Village, found out about the protest event on Facebook, she said.

“I felt like [attending the protest] was the least I could do given what’s going on with the election. Donald Trump has been saying horrendous, horrific, racist, hatred-inducing things since he started this,” she explained.

“By having these protests and speaking out, anything that we can do to prevent messages of hatred and racism and sexism and xenophobia and transphobia from being… accepted as normal or being met with silence, that’s what we have to do."

Geisinger filed a police report in part because “we excuse so much of this behavior," she said.

“We excuse the guy at the bodega who says, ‘Oh, give me a smile,’ and we excuse the boys in class who snap your bra strap, and we excuse the men who catcall you on the street as just boy’s behavior,” she said. “I hope that by being one more voice, that it brings it to light, and it can somehow curb this behavior, or this acceptance of this behavior.”

Geisinger also pointed out the “plain irony” of being groped at a protest while holding up a sign calling for people to respect women’s bodies.

“To me to be in this place where you’re shouting things like, ‘GOP, hands off me,’ and then have someone’s hands on you, it said something very political,” she said.

After the protest, she asked fellow attendees to send her photos of the protest that could help identify the groper.

“That he can just walk away from that, it was symbolic, on a microcosm, of what we’re dealing with on a larger scale," Geisinger said.