Moby says he once 'knob-touched' Donald Trump at a party

Moby’s new book includes a passage that might make you do a double-take.

But it does say that the musician thinks he once did what’s called a “knob-touch,” defined by his friend as one removing his member from his pants and brushing it up against someone at a party, on future President Donald Trump.

As the “South Side” musician writes in an excerpt of his book Then It Fell Apart, first published in The Daily Beast, the incident happened in the days following the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Moby, whose real name is Richard Melville Hall, recalled in an intro to the excerpt that, “the only way in which I knew how to process my grief was to stay drunk, do as many drugs as possible, and throw myself into whatever degeneracy flowed out of New York’s perpetually degenerate spigot. Sometimes the degeneracy was gritty and old school — cheap drugs in dive bars and sex in tetanus-y bathrooms. And sometimes the degeneracy was gilded — helicopters to Staten Island and parties with billionaires.”

His encounter with Trump happened, if it really happened at all, during one of the latter situations. Moby wrote that he was “dared to” perform the act by brushing up against Donald Trump’s suit jacket.

“Although, in the spirit of alcoholic disclosure, my caveat is this: as I was very drunk and high at the time I’m still not 100% sure it actually happened. But even though this happened almost 20 years ago, I’m still perpetually stunned by the fact that Americans elected as president a dimwitted con man whose only claim to fame is that he once hosted a mediocre reality-TV show.”

Moby described the event as having been a party for a “wealthy real-estate developer” with “tight security” at a restaurant on Park Avenue and 20th Street.

He said he had already consumed “three glasses of champagne, three glasses of red wine with dinner, a shot of vodka before dessert, and an Armagnac digestif,” when a drunk friend suggested he “knob-touch” Trump, whom he described as a “mid-level real-estate developer and tabloid-newspaper staple whose career had recently been resuscitated by a reality-TV show.” (Although the story was labelled as “New York City, 2001,” it’s worth noting that The Apprentice wouldn’t debut until January 2004.)

It started when one friend described it to another of their companions as “not sexual, it’s just stupid and funny. You only knob-touch their clothes, and the person you knob-touch can’t know they’ve been knob-touched.”

Moby admitted to the group that he’d never done this before. When they urged him to try it on Trump, he agreed.

The musician wrote that he casually walked past Trump, trying to brush the edge of his jacket. “Luckily he didn’t seem to notice or even twitch.”

When Moby’s friends asked him if he’d one what they dared him to do, he said, “I think so. I think I knob-touched Donald Trump.”

These days, Moby regularly makes Trump the target of his tweets.

His book, Then It Fell Apart, is available for pre-order at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

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