Fish, it is often observed, grow larger every time the angler tells the story. The trout that got away in May is a salmon by August and, by Christmas, something that would have troubled Captain Ahab. It is a harmless human failing, so long as we are talking about fish. It is rather less harmless when we are talking about an accusation of rape against the President of the United States, unveiled by his political opponents eight days before a national election.
Beatrice Keul is a Swiss former model and beauty contestant, now in her mid-fifties, who lives in Zurich. In 1992 she placed third in the Miss Switzerland competition, which is a perfectly respectable achievement, though you would not know it from the American press, which now routinely describes her as “a former Miss Switzerland”. She worked in banking in Zurich and modelled part-time, and she went on to compete for Miss Europe. In November 1993 she flew to the United States on an all-expenses-paid trip to take part in the American Dream Pageant, a contest with events in Atlantic City and New York that had a partnership with Donald Trump, then a 47-year-old property developer with a weakness for beauty pageants and his own name in gold letters.
She has documents from that trip, and that matters. She has said she found them in a box while preparing to move house: an invitation, plane tickets, a commemorative plaque and photographs of herself with Trump. The New York Times has reported that she supplied photographs and paperwork confirming her participation. So we can be confident that she was there and that she met him. Nobody sensible disputes that.
What happened next is the question, and it depends on which year you ask her.
And the media refuse to report the following uncomfortable facts…