Trump Tower
She SaidTrump Tower is both Rachel Crooks’s place of employment and the setting of her 2005 encounter with Donald Trump. In the book, its office floors provide the everyday workplace context for a brief interaction that Crooks later described as an unwanted advance.
Workplace and setting
In 2005, Crooks had moved to New York with her boyfriend and rented a low-cost apartment on the outskirts of Brooklyn. They slept on an air mattress until they could afford a futon. To help pay the rent, she took a secretarial job at a real-estate development firm on the twenty-fourth floor of Trump Tower. The firm worked on deals with The Trump Organization, placing her in a professional environment connected to Trump’s business interests.
The building also stood within a growing public profile for Trump. The Apprentice had premiered the previous year and was the season’s most popular new show. That context distinguishes the workplace encounter from a meeting with an obscure executive: Crooks encountered someone whose public visibility was rising alongside his business presence in the tower.
Crooks’s encounter
One winter day, Crooks saw Trump waiting for an elevator outside her office. She left her desk to introduce herself with a businesslike handshake. She later said he did not let go, kissed her, and then kissed her on the lips. The encounter lasted a minute or two; she was twenty-two. The account places the incident in the ordinary passage of an office day, outside her workplace, rather than in a formal meeting or private setting.
Narrative significance
Trump Tower’s role in the account is specific: it locates Crooks’s employment and the encounter she described, while the firm’s business ties explain why Trump was present near her office. The building brings together the professional hierarchy and celebrity context surrounding the episode. Crooks’s introduction began as a routine workplace gesture, but her account presents the interaction as unwanted and consequential enough to become part of the public record about Trump’s treatment of women.
