Former model Stacey Williams said she believed Donald Trump had groped her to show off to her then-boyfriend, the late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, when the couple stopped by to visit him at Trump Tower in New York in 1993.

In her first extensive on-camera interview since speaking to the Guardian about the assault allegations, Williams told CNN late Thursday that she remembered the former president and Epstein smiling at each other while the real estate mogul groped her , which gave her the impression that the entire incident was a “coordinated” game between the two men.

Their report comes just weeks before the presidential election, in which polls show Trump and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris are essentially neck and neck. Trump has denied Williams' reports.

“As soon as he was in front of me, he pulled me close and his hands were just on me and wouldn't let go,” Williams told CNN, echoing her account to the Guardian.

“Then the hands started moving to the side of my breasts, to my hips, back to my butt, back up, so to speak – they were just on me the whole time and I froze,” she said.

Williams briefly dated Epstein in the 1990s. At the time, she told the Guardian, she and Epstein were walking through Manhattan when he suggested they visit Trump at his Trump Tower complex on Fifth Avenue.

The two were good friends, she said. Trump later distanced himself from Epstein after the financier was convicted of sex trafficking in Florida, several years before he was arrested in New York in 2019 on federal sex charges and killed himself in custody.

She added, as she did in her report to the Guardian, that she now believes the incident was planned all along by Epstein and Trump. When they met Trump, she claims he immediately grabbed her and groped her, right in front of her boyfriend.

“That context didn't make sense because the hands were on me and he and Jeffrey just kept talking and looking at each other and smiling,” she said. Later, as the couple left, she said that Epstein berated her for allowing Trump to touch her and that the whole incident left her confused and sick.

“I just had this really sickening feeling that everything was coordinated and I was being rolled into a strange, twisted game like a piece of meat,” she told CNN. “I felt a wave of shame,” she said, recalling the incident, “put it in a little box inside me, turned the key and locked it.”

Williams told the Guardian in an exclusive first interview this week that she felt at the time that Trump and Epstein were “really, really good friends.” Williams also shared an undated postcard featuring a view of Palm Beach, Florida, home of Trump's Mar-a-Lago mansion, which she said Trump later sent her.

“Your second home,” the postcard read. “Love, Donald.”

Trump's campaign said in a response to CNN that Williams' allegations were a “false story concocted by Kamala Harris' campaign” to distract from a second incident in which Doug Emhoff is accused of slapping a former girlfriend. A campaign spokesman for Harris, the US vice president, denied the allegations against her husband earlier this month.

Williams' report will add to a long list of women who have accused Trump of sexual assault, ranging from writer E. Jean Carroll, who was eventually exonerated by a civil jury that found Trump liable for sexual abuse, to his ex-wife Ivana Trump, who accused the former president of raping her, in a divorce statement.

Williams said she gained the courage to speak out about the incident after the recent release of a documentary called “Beyond the Gaze” about Sports Illustrated magazine's swimwear issue.

“I can't control when a documentary comes out, I can't control whether it premieres two weeks before the election,” Williams told CNN. Although Williams alluded to the incident in comments on social media, she had never told her story in detail until this week.

“It takes a lot of courage and you really have to prepare for that onslaught and I'm ready now,” she said. “Just bring it with you.”

• Information and support for anyone affected by sexual abuse is available from the following organizations. In the US, Rainn offers support at 800-656-4673. In the UK, Rape Crisis Support is available on 0808 500 2222. In Australia, support is available on 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Further international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html