Donald Trump Has A Woman Problem: He Wanted To Fire Women For Not Being Pretty, Employees Say

Managers at Trump National Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, in the mid-2000s had to make sure the so-called "pretty" female employees were working when their blustery boss came to visit. Court records show he had made it clear to them he wanted to fire the women he felt weren't attractive enough, the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday.

The Times surfaced a sworn declaration from Hayley Strozier, the 2008 director of catering at the club, which described the way Donald Trump, now the Republican nominee for president, interacted with women at the swanky establishment. "I had witnessed Donald Trump tell managers many times while he was visiting the club that restaurant hostesses were 'not pretty enough' and that they should be fired and replaced with more attractive women," she said, according to the Times.

It reportedly created an atmosphere where everyone understood what the billionaire wanted. "Initially, I heard Mr. Trump say this almost every time he visit the club (which was perhaps four or five times a year)," Strozier said, according to the court document posted online by the Times. "Later he made these comments less frequently because the club's managers knew about this 'attitude' or tendency of his and capitulated to it by changing the schedules of our employees so that the most attractive women were scheduled to work when Mr. Trump was scheduled to be at the club."

A restaurant manager made similar claims in a 2009 court document saying Trump wanted attractive women to work at the club and she knew this "because one time he took me aside and said, 'I want you to get some good looking hostesses here. People like to see good looking people when they come in,'" according to the Times.

Similar claims emerged in 2012 court documents that were part of a labor relations lawsuit levied against a Trump development company in the Los Angeles courts, the Times reported.

A Trump Organization lawyer told the paper the claims were without merit and denied any discrimination. The full report can be read here.

Trump has said numerous things to women and about women that many feel are offensive. During the campaign alone, he's had major run-ins with Fox anchor Megyn Kelly ("You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her — wherever") and Carly Fiorina ("Look at that face. Would anybody vote for that?"). In the past he has called women "pigs" and "dogs" and recently came under fire for once calling 1996 winner of Miss Universe pageant Alicia Machado "Miss Piggy" and "Miss Housekeeping."

Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has steadily outpaced Trump in support among women at times by more than 20 percentage points. Worse for Trump still, the first presidential debate Monday caused 27 percent of women respondents to think worse of the Republican nominee, according to an NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll. Meanwhile 30 percent of women said their opinion of Clinton had improved after the debate, according to the poll.

The major Times story was also not the only controversy to befall the Trump campaign Thursday either. A feature from Newsweek, which is a part of International Business Times' parent company IBT Media, reported that a Trump business sidestepped an embargo on doing business with communist Cuba in the 1990s.