Witness says Trump did nothing to stop bat beating in 1991
Donald Trump's long-held claim that he stopped a brutal assault in midtown Manhattan more than a quarter-century ago is bogus, the event’s only known witness told the Daily News.
“He came at the tail end of the event,” Kathleen Romeo-Nunez, 43, said Thursday of the November 1991 attack.
“There was no opportunity” for Trump to intervene, she said.
Trump had said that he came to the aid of a man who was being attacked with a baseball bat – a story recirculating online after the President claimed this week that he would have run into a Florida school during a recent shooting “even if I didn’t have a weapon.”
Decades before entering the White House, Trump was on his way to a Paula Abdul concert with Marla Maples and another couple in his limo when the group noticed a sidewalk attack in progress.
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"Someone in the car looked over and said, 'Gee, look at that, it's a mugging,'" the future President told the Daily News at the time. "I said to my driver to stop the car because it was brutal-looking."
Trump said that he confronted the man with the bat.
“The guy with the bat looked at me, and I said, “Look, you’ve gotta stop this. Put down the bat,”‘ Trump said. “I guess he recognized me because he said, ‘Mr. Trump, I didn’t do anything wrong.’ I said, ‘How could you not do anything wrong when you’re whacking a guy with a bat?’ Then he ran away.”
An unidentified witness also told the Daily News at the time that Trump confronted the assailant, yelling, “Put that bat down. What are you doing?” before the man dropped the bat and started talking to the real estate mogul.
Reporter James Rosen’s story about the attack was published in the Daily News Nov. 20, 1991, with the headline “Mugger’s Trumped.”
“Call it The Donald to The Rescue,” Rosen wrote.
Trump – well known for planting coverage or creating sources to promote himself and his companies – initially feigned modesty.
“I’m not looking to play this thing up,” Trump said. “I’m surprised you found out about it.”
Romeo-Nunez – then a 16-year-old student at St. Michael’s Academy in Manhattan – said at the time that Trump did not do anything to stop the attack. She recalled to The News on Thursday that she had just come out of a store at 45th St. and Ninth Ave. when the attack was ending, and that Trump arrived a few minutes later.
"A car pulls up, he gets out, people acknowledge his presence," she told The News Thursday. "He's looking around, seeing what's going on. Then he got back in and left."
The beat-down was never reported to the police.
Romeo-Nunez said she always wondered who the other unidentified witness was, but said that person's account was not true. The assailant "was running away" as Trump got out of the limo, and the attacker and Trump never spoke to each other, she said.
Trump said Monday that he would have run into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida to save students during last month's massacre, even if he was not armed.
"I highly doubt that he would do that," Romeo-Nunez said.
Requests for comment from Trump Organization and the White House were not immediately returned, and a publicist for Maples said she was traveling and unavailable for comment.
