The Guardian reported on Thursday that Amy Dorris, a former second-tier model and actress, had suddenly popped out of the woodwork to claim that, 23 years ago, Trump kissed and groped her when she was a guest in his private box at the U.S. Open.  Trump firmly denies that this ever happened.

Whatever happened in 1997, this is a non-story.  True or false, it's a re-run of the "grab 'em by the p----" October surprise story from 2016.  The timing makes the truth of the story suspect; it describes behavior that was still reasonably normative in the mid-1990s; and the left gave Joe Biden a pass for digitally raping a young employee in Congress.  If this is a dead horse, the left killed it.

Amy Dorris is a former bit-part actress, small-time model, and P.R. person, who is now a full-time wife and mother.  Dorris gave a big interview to The Guardian in which she claimed that, when she was a guest in Donald Trump's private box at the 1997 U.S. Open tennis tournament, he grabbed her, French kissed her, and groped her.  She also gave The Guardian pictures of her smiling happily in Trump's company both at the U.S. Open and in the days after.

Briefly, Dorris says she and her boyfriend attended the U.S. Open in Trump's box.  After she went to the bathroom to fix her contact lenses, says Dorris, she stepped out to find Trump waiting.  He allegedly grabbed Dorris, kissing and groping her as she said, "No, please stop."

That's it.  Dorris says friends and her mother corroborate her recollection, although she has no contemporaneous evidence other than a handful of photographs showing her smiling happily alongside Trump.

There are a lot of problems with this narrative.

First, the Guardian concedes that Trump denies the allegation, as does Dorris's former boyfriend.  Trump's attorneys have noted that the bathroom was visible to the rest of the box, making an aggressive assault visible to all.

There's also the fact that most of Dorris's pictures were taken after the alleged assault and show her in Trump's company and voluntarily sitting next to him or standing near him.  That behavior is at odds with her current claim that she felt a sense of horrified revulsion at the time.

Second, if Trump's "grab 'em by the p----" remark didn't derail Trump's election outcome in 2016, this won't, either.  Trump's never hidden any aspect of his life.  His supporters know that he sowed his wild oats and has now settled into a disciplined life devoted to repairing his beloved, and significantly damaged, country.

Third, the timing of Dorris's revelation is suspect.  Dorris has 13-year-old twin daughters and claims that she felt it was time to show her daughters that she stands for something.  Interestingly, she didn't stand for something in January, or April, or 2016.  It's merely a coincidence that Dorris finally stands for something just in time for a slightly early October surprise.  In that regard, she seems like a sister under the skin to Christine Blowsy-Fraud, who turned up just in time to try to destroy Justice Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination, and then crawled away to oblivion when she failed.

Fourth, even if Trump did as Dorris alleges, and she didn't like it, I hate to say this, but what Trump did wasn't a big deal back in the 1990s.  We weren't as woke and sensitive back then.

Ironically, Whoopi Goldberg, when she tried to defend Roman Polanski for sodomizing a 13-year-old girl, was harking back to the days when she said it wasn't "rape-rape."  Goldberg was wrong about Polanski (statutory rape is always "rape-rape"), but she was right about the fact that, back in the day, we were less quick to call men's "moves" either rape or sexual assault.

In the 1990s, if we were told about Trump's conduct, we would have said he "hit on her."  While Dorris might not have liked it, only those steeped in academic theory considered what he did a criminal or "rapey" act, as opposed to being a boor and a jerk.  As the French would say, autres temps, autres mœurs ("other times, other values").

Fifth, Tara Reade reported that, in 1993, when she was a young woman working for Sen. Joe Biden (a spectacularly asymmetrical power relationship), Biden pushed her against a wall in Congress and penetrated her with his finger.  Even in the 1990s, because of the penetration, that was pure sexual assault.  Tara Reade also had contemporaneous evidence in the form of a phone call from her mother to Larry King.

The Democrats did not care.  They nominated Biden anyway, and even Kamala Harris, who once believed the woman, is "over it."

Sixth, given the timing, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Dorris is yet another one of the many Democrat-supporting women who try to use sexual assault claims to destroy Republican "enemies" (see Kavanaugh, above).  I haven't forgotten that, back in 2016, aggressively partisan Hillary hardliners popped up their heads to make allegations against Trump, and then, as with Blowsy-Fraud, they went away when they were unable to achieve a political end.

For all these reasons, while it's clear that Democrats find Dorris's allegations politically titillating, no Trump-supporters will budge. This is a yawn.