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Woman Claims George H.W. Bush Groped Her When She Was 16 Years Old

(Photo Credit: Robert Deutsch-USA TODAY Sports/REUTERS)

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Another woman has claimed George H.W. Bush groped her during a photo opportunity in 2003 when she was just 16 years old.

Roslyn Corrigan is the sixth woman to come forward with groping allegations against the former president, deciding to speak with TIME magazine about the alleged incident after hearing about his other accusers.

Corrigan attended an event at the the Central Intelligence Agency in The Woodlands, Texas where she had an opportunity to meet Bush and she and her mother posed for a photo with him. Growing up dreaming of getting into politics, she was excited to meet the former president, but was instead shocked and devastated when Bush grabbed her butt as the photo was being taken.

(Photo credit: Reuters)

“As soon as the picture was being snapped on the one-two-three he dropped his hands from my waist down to my buttocks and gave it a nice, ripe squeeze, which would account for the fact that in the photograph my mouth is hanging wide open,” Corrigan said of the alleged incident. “I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, what just happened?’”

“My initial action was absolute horror. I was really, really confused,” Corrigan added. “The first thing I did was look at my mom and, while he was still standing there, I didn’t say anything. What does a teenager say to the ex-president of the United States? Like, ‘Hey dude, you shouldn’t have touched me like that?’”

Bush has apologized through his spokesman Jim McGrath to the other accusers and explained that being in a wheelchair puts him at waist level with those who take photos with him. But Bush was 79 years old at the time of Corrigan’s alleged incident and not yet in a wheelchair, so she claims that “excuse for his senile, old man antics… is not true.”

“When I heard that was the reason, like, ‘Oh, he’s just an old man and he doesn’t know any better and he’s just being harmless and playful and it’s just where his arm falls… I just burst into uncontrollable sobbing,” Corrigan said. “I just couldn’t sit with that. I can’t. I cannot sit with that. I can’t sleep anymore, because that’s not true, and it’s not an excuse.”

REUTERS/Adrees Latif

Corrigan has told multiple people about the incident over the years, including her mother who she told right after it allegedly occurred. However, a lot of people didn’t believe her or dismissed it as something minor.

“I don’t know, maybe it never really hit people that I was a child at the time and that goes beyond a guy being inappropriate in the workplace to a peer or somebody in his age range,” she said. “I was a child.”

“It completely floored me. I was actually there to be taken seriously, and I wasn’t,” she added. “I thought, he’s a career politician, almost 80 years old or something like that, if anybody’s going to take me a little bit seriously or at least try to pretend he’s interested in what I have to say, it would be this guy. And he didn’t. All he did was grab my butt.”