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Clinton Calls Trump a 'Creep' for Debate Behavior in Election Memoir

August 23, 2017

Hillary Clinton refers to Donald Trump as a "creep" and says her "skin crawled" during one of their debates in an except from her upcoming 2016 election memoir What Happened.

In their town hall-style debate on Oct. 9 where the candidates were allowed to walk around the stage, Trump at various points walked behind Clinton as she spoke. MSNBC aired her narration of that section of the book Tuesday morning, where Clinton recounted her thoughts that she was "incredibly uncomfortable."

"This is not OK, I thought," she wrote. "It was the second presidential debate, and Donald Trump was looming behind me. Two days before, the world heard him brag about groping women. Now we were on a small stage, and no matter where I walked, he followed me closely, staring at me, making faces. It was incredibly uncomfortable."

Trump was "literally breathing down my neck. My skin crawled," she wrote.

Clinton said she wished in the moment she could hit "pause" and ask people watching what they would do.

"Do you stay calm, keep smiling and carry on as if he weren't repeatedly invading your space? Or do you turn, look him in the eye and say loudly and clearly, 'Back up, you creep. Get away from me. I know you love to intimidate women, but you can't intimidate me, so back up,'" she wrote.

She said she chose to stay calm, "aided by a lifetime of dealing with difficult men trying to throw me off."

Clinton wrote that, with the book, she wants to "pull back the curtain on an experience that was exhilarating, joyful, humbling, infuriating, and just plain baffling."

"Writing this wasn't easy. Every day that I was a candidate for president, I knew that millions of people were counting on me, and I couldn't bear the idea of letting them down," she wrote. "But I did. I couldn't get the job done, and I'll have to live with that for the rest of my life."

Clinton's book will be released on Sept. 12.