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Near the end of Monday's presidential debate, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton accused her rival, GOP nominee Donald Trump of taunting Venezuelan Alicia Machado, who won the Miss Universe contest in 1996. "He called this woman Miss Piggy," Clinton said. "Then he called her Miss Housekeeping because she was Latina."
Following the debate, the Clinton campaign tweeted a two-minute video about Machado's experience with Trump.
"He was very overwhelming. I was very scared of him," she says in Spanish. "He'd yell at me all the time. He'd tell me 'you look ugly' or 'you look fat.' Sometimes he'd 'play' with me and say 'Hello Miss Piggy, hello Miss Housekeeping.'"
The former beauty queen said she struggled for five years with anorexia and bulimia because of the pressure she experienced under Trump, who had purchased the rights to the beauty contest.
For his part, Trump Monday denied mistreating Machado. But in a Tuesday morning interview on Fox News, he told a different story.
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"I know that person, she was a Miss Universe person and she was the worst we ever had ... The worst, the absolute worst ... she gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem," Trump said.
Clinton, of course, is exploiting Trump's low approval ratings with women voters. While most polls showed that Trump had narrowed Clinton's lead to pull statistically even with her entering Monday's debate at Hofstra University in Long Island, most pundits and polls said that Clinton won the debate convincingly.
Machado was the first Miss Universe winner after Trump bought the pageant in 1996. She was 19 at the time. Trump eventually sold the franchise after Univision, the world's largest Spanish-language network, decided not to broadcast the pageant following Trump's insidious comments on Mexicans.
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