The particulars of the indictment against former President Donald J. Trump have yet to be revealed, but the salient details are heaven-made for headlines and screen crawls:

Sex. Porn star. Sex. Hush money. Sex.

Trump maintains his innocence in now-familiar fashion, framing himself as the righteous victim of “thugs and radical left monsters”. But the indictment’s salacious nature resurrects the Donald Trump who existed well before he became the 45th President — before his ubiquitous MAGA catchphrase, before his claims to be greater than Washington or Lincoln, before the two impeachments and one Capitol riot.

That would be the Donald Trump who liked to present himself as a player, extremely confident that his wealth and looks made him catnip to women. A man who could talk about threesomes with a radio shock jock, boldly stroll through a dressing area filled with pageant contestants, rate women on a 1-to-10 scale based on their physical appearance.

It is a part of Trump’s persona that has repeatedly come back to haunt him, most recently on Thursday, when a Manhattan grand jury forever branded him as the first former President formally charged with a crime.

The little known about the case is scandalous enough. It revolves around $130,000 that Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, paid to the pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels for her silence about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump in 2006, well before his presidency and while his third wife stayed home with their infant son.

Trump, who recently began his campaign for the 2024 presidential election, is hardly the first President to be linked to sexual impropriety. Bill Clinton had sexual relations with the female intern he infamously said he didn’t have sexual relations with in the Oval Office. John F. Kennedy’s many affairs included one with a woman who was also intimate with a Chicago mob boss. Warren G. Harding fathered a child with a mistress who claimed that they had sex in a White House coat room. There are more.

But Trump’s long public history of entanglements, boasts and crude comments distinguishes him in the presidential pantheon.

As a young man in the 1970s, Trump hit the Manhattan clubs and tipped off the gossip columns to his dalliances, all in keeping with his effort to shed the appearance of being just a rich kid from Queens working for his father’s real estate company.

He married Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech model, in 1977 and concentrated on making his mark in real estate. But their relationship foundered in 1989 when Zelnickova discovered what others already knew: that Trump was having an affair with model and actress Marla Maples.

The tit-for-tat squabbling that ensued was the tabloid gift that kept on giving, with a highlight — or lowlight — being a New York Post front page in 1990 that featured a grinning Trump and a headline that said: “Marla boasts to her pals about Donald: ‘BEST SEX I’VE EVER HAD.’”

Lou Colasuonno, the Post editor who laid out that front page, remembered thinking, “He’s never going to sue us for this headline.”

But Maples, whose marriage to Trump ended in 1999, subsequently denied saying those words, and Barbara Res, a former Trump Organisation executive, later said that while she worried about its impact on the Trump children, their father “thought it was the greatest thing”.

The perception of sexual prowess seemed central to the persona that Trump cultivated.

Linda Stasi, a novelist and former columnist for both The Post and The Daily News, recalled in an email that Trump once left a message on her voicemail, pretending to be someone else and saying in a fake voice that Donald Trump was having lunch at such-and-such restaurant and was surrounded by beautiful models.

“You should write about this,” she recalled the tipster saying.

“His fake accent was about as real as his orange tan,” wrote Stasi, who added that the first time she met Trump, he said, “Well, you’re a pretty one, aren’t you?”

“I think I said, ‘What? Seriously?’”

And Colasuonno, a former editor-in-chief for both The Post and The Daily News, remembered sharing two private meals with Trump in the early 1990s, at a time the real estate developer was frantically denying his very obvious and deep financial troubles. “The conversation was 50 per cent about ‘babes’ and the other half were lies about his financial situation,” Colasuonno said.

While serving as the editor of Vanity Fair in 1993, Graydon Carter invited Trump to be a guest of the magazine at the White House Correspondents’ dinner. Carter said he seated the developer beside a well-known model, who before long asked to move to another seat. “He is the most vulgar human being I have ever met,” he recalled her saying. “He asked me to judge whether other women’s legs and breasts are better or inferior to his wife’s.”

Another woman, the journalist E. Jean Carroll, has alleged that around this time — in 1995 or 1996 — she encountered Trump, an acquaintance, in a high-end Manhattan department store. After he asked for help in buying a gift for a woman, she said, the two wound up in a dressing room, where he raped her.

Carroll laid out her allegations in a New York magazine article in 2019. Trump denied the charges this way: “I’ll say it with great respect: No. 1, she’s not my type. No. 2, it never happened. It never happened, OK?”

Carroll has since filed two civil lawsuits against Trump, for defamation and for battery and defamation. One of those cases is set to go to trial this month.

Trump did not reserve his crass comments for private conversations, as evidenced by his many appearances on the Howard Stern radio show. In bantering with its provocative host from 2005 to 2010, for example, the future President rated women on their looks, suggested that he had once had a threesome with women whose combined weight was 375 pounds, and recalled a particular perk of owning the Miss Universe pageant: going backstage for a so-called inspection while contestants were dressing.

Some of Trump’s recorded comments, peppered with crude references to the female anatomy, are more famous than most of his speeches as President. “Just kiss,” he advised at one point. “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”

After playing down his comments as “locker-room banter”, Trump apologised to his family and to the American people. But Trump’s past as a self-styled player kept bobbing to the surface of the MAGA-red sea.