NEW YORK — On Thursday, Donald Trump angrily denied several accusations of groping in a growing controversy over inappropriate behavior with women that is damaging the Republican presidential candidate’s chances of winning the Nov. 8 election.

Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, the New York Times and other media were engaged in a concerted, “vicious” attempt to stop him, Trump told a rally in West Palm Beach, Florida.

“These claims are all fabricated. They’re pure fiction and they’re outright lies. These events never, ever happened,” Trump said, adding he would make public at some point evidence to dispute the claims.

“These vicious claims about me of inappropriate conduct with women are totally and absolutely false. And the Clintons know it and they know well.”

Trump spoke after the New York Times reported on Wednesday evening that two women had endured sexual aggression from Trump, and several other women made similar allegations in other media outlets, putting more pressure on Trump as he lags behind Clinton in national opinion polls.

Trump’s campaign was already struggling to contain a crisis after a video surfaced last week showing him bragging in 2005 about groping women and making unwanted sexual advances.

One woman, Jessica Leeds, appeared on camera on The New York Times’ website to recount how Trump grabbed her breasts and tried to put his hand up her skirt on a flight from the Midwest to New York in or around 1980. 

The second woman, Rachel Crooks, described how Trump “kissed me directly on the mouth” in an unwanted advance in 2005 outside the elevator in Trump Tower in Manhattan, where she was a receptionist at a real estate firm.

On Wednesday night, Trump’s campaign made public a letter to the newspaper from a lawyer representing Trump, demanding it retract the story, calling it libelous and threatening legal action if it did not comply.

“This entire article is fiction, and for the New York Times to launch a completely false, coordinated character assassination against Mr. Trump on a topic like this is dangerous,” the Trump campaign’s senior communications adviser, Jason Miller, said in a statement.

The New York Times said on Thursday it stood by its story and rejected claims the article was libelous.

“Nothing in our article has had the slightest effect on the reputation that Mr. Trump, through his own words and actions, has already created for himself,” said David McCraw, vice president and assistant general counsel for the newspaper, in a letter to Trump’s lawyer.

If Trump disagrees that the story was libelous, “we welcome the opportunity to have a court set him straight,” McCraw said.

The Times report came just two days after a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll showed one in five Republicans thought Trump’s comments about groping women disqualified him from the presidency. The poll also showed him 8 points behind Clinton among likely voters.

Trump, a New York businessman and former reality TV star, has never previously run for political office. Controversy has stalked his White House campaign since the day in June 2015 when he announced he was running for president, describing Mexican immigrants as rapists and calling for a “Muslim ban” at the borders.