Donald Trump bragged in vulgar terms about kissing, groping and trying to have sex with women during a 2005 conversation caught on a hot microphone, saying that “when you’re a star, they let you do it,” according to a video obtained by The Washington Post.
The video captures Trump talking with
Billy Bush, then of “Access Hollywood,” on a bus with the show’s name written across the side. They were arriving on the set of “Days of Our Lives” to tape a segment about Trump’s cameo on the soap opera.
Late Friday night, following sharp criticism by Republican leaders, Trump issued a short video statement saying, “I said it, I was wrong, and I apologize.” But he also called the revelation “a distraction from the issues we are facing today.” He said that his “foolish” words are much different than the words and actions of Bill Clinton, whom he accused of abusing women, and Hillary Clinton, whom he accused of having “bullied, attacked, shamed and intimidated his victims.”
“I’ve never said I’m a perfect person, nor pretended to be someone that I’m not. I’ve said and done things I regret, and the words released today on this more than a decade-old video are one of them. Anyone who knows me knows these words don’t reflect who I am,” Trump said.
In an apparent response to Republican critics asking him to drop out of the race, he said: “We will discuss this more in the coming days. See you at the debate on Sunday.”
The tape includes audio of Bush and Trump talking inside the bus, as well as audio and video once they emerge from it to begin shooting the segment.
In that audio, Trump discusses a failed attempt to seduce a woman, whose full name is not given in the video.
“I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it,” Trump is heard saying. It was unclear when the events he was describing took place. The tape was recorded several months after he married his third wife, Melania.
“Whoa,” another voice said.
“I did try and f--- her. She was married,” Trump says.
Trump continues: “And I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture. I said, ‘I’ll show you where they have some nice furniture.’”
“I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there. And she was married,” Trump says. “Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything. She’s totally changed her look.”
At that point in the audio, Trump and Bush appear to notice Arianne Zucker, the actress who is waiting to escort them into the soap-opera set.
“Your girl’s hot as s---, in the purple,” says Bush, who’s now a co-host of NBC’s “Today” show.
“Whoa!” Trump says. “Whoa!”
“I’ve got to use some Tic Tacs, just in case I start kissing her,” Trump says. “You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.”
“And when you’re a star, they let you do it,” Trump says. “You can do anything.”
“Whatever you want,” says another voice, apparently Bush’s.
“Grab them by the p---y,” Trump says. “You can do anything.”
A spokeswoman for NBC Universal, which produces and distributes “Access Hollywood,” declined to comment.
“This was locker-room banter, a private conversation that took place many years ago. Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course — not even close,” Trump said in a statement. “I apologize if anyone was offended.”
Billy Bush, in a statement released by NBC Universal, said: “Obviously I’m embarrassed and ashamed. It’s no excuse, but this happened eleven years ago — I was younger, less mature, and acted foolishly in playing along. I’m very sorry.”
After the video appeared online Friday afternoon, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton wrote on Twitter: “This is horrific. We cannot allow this man to become president.” Her running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine (Va.), told reporters, “It makes me sick to my stomach,” while campaigning in Las Vegas.
Planned Parenthood Action Fund, which has endorsed Clinton, issued a statement from Executive Vice President Dawn Laguens saying: “What Trump described in these tapes amounts to sexual assault.”
Trump was also criticized by members of his own party. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, who said he is “sickened” by Trump’s comments, said the Republican presidential candidate will no longer appear with him at a campaign event in Wisconsin on Saturday.
“Women are to be championed and revered, not objectified. I hope Mr. Trump treats this situation with the seriousness it deserves and works to demonstrate to the country that he has greater respect for women than this clip suggests,” Ryan said in a statement.
In a short statement issued moments after Ryan’s, Trump said his running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, “will be representing me” at the Wisconsin event.
Sen. Kelly Ayotte (N.H.), who is running for reelection and has said she will vote for Trump, called his comments “totally inappropriate and offensive.”
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, who has stood by Trump uncritically through numerous controversies, said in a statement: “No woman should ever be described in these terms or talked about in this manner. Ever.”
Former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, a Trump critic, said in a statement: “Hitting on married women? Condoning assault? Such vile degradations demean our wives and daughters and corrupt America’s face to the world.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said the comments are “repugnant, and unacceptable in any circumstance” and made clear Trump’s brief statement would not suffice.
“As the father of three daughters, I strongly believe that Trump needs to apologize directly to women and girls everywhere, and take full responsibility for the utter lack of respect for women shown in his comments on that tape,” he said late Friday.
One of Trump’s most prominent social-conservative supporters, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, told BuzzFeed’s Rosie Gray: “My personal support for Donald Trump has never been based upon shared values.”
Trump’s running mate, Pence, was at a diner in Toledo when the news broke
— about to view the diner’s collection of signed cardboard hot-dog buns, which includes one signed by Trump. But the reporters traveling with Pence were quickly ushered out of the diner by campaign staff, before they could ask Trump’s running mate about it,
according to Politico.
Politico reported that the journalists, traveling in Pence’s “protective pool,” were not permitted to film Pence as he left the diner.
The tape appears at a time when Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, has sought to make a campaign issue out of his opponent’s marriage. Trump has criticized former president Bill Clinton for his past infidelity and criticized opponent Hillary Clinton as her husband’s “enabler.”
“Hillary Clinton was married to the single greatest abuser of women in the history of politics,” Trump
told the New York Times in a recent interview. “Hillary was an enabler, and she attacked the women who Bill Clinton mistreated afterward.
I think it’s a serious problem for them, and it’s something that I’m considering talking about more in the near future.”
Trump carried on a very public affair with Marla Maples — his eventual second wife — while still married to first wife Ivana Trump.
Trump has been criticized in this campaign for derogatory and lewd comments about women, including some made on TV and live radio. In
an interview Wednesday with KSNV, a Las Vegas television station, Trump said that those comments were made for entertainment.
“A lot of that was done for the purpose of entertainment. There’s nobody that has more respect for women than I do,” he told the station.
“Are you trying to tone it down now?” asked the interviewer, Jim Snyder.
“It’s not a question of trying, it’s very easy,” Trump said.
The tape obtained by The Post seems to have captured Trump in a private moment, with no audience beyond Bush and a few others on the bus. It appears to have been shot around Sept. 16, 2005, which was the day media reports said Trump would tape his soap-opera cameo.
The video shows the bus carrying Trump and Bush turning down a street on the studio back lot. The two men cannot be seen.
“Oh, nice legs, huh?” Trump says.
“Oof, get out of the way, honey,” Bush says, apparently referencing somebody else blocking the view of Zucker.
The two men then exit the bus and greet Zucker.
“We’re ready, let’s go,” Trump says, after the initial greetings. “Make me a soap star.”
“How about a little hug for the Donald?” Bush says. “He just got off the bus.”
“Would you like a little hug, darling?” Zucker says.
“Absolutely,” Trump says. As they embrace, and air-kiss, Trump says, “Melania said this was okay.”
The video then follows Trump, Bush and Zucker into the studio. Trump did appear on “Days of Our Lives” in late October. In a tape of that cameo
posted online, Zucker’s character asks Trump — playing himself — for a job at his business, and tells him suggestively, “I think you’ll find I’m a very willing employee. Working under you, I think, could be mutually beneficial.”
Trump’s character gives her the brushoff.
“That’s an interesting proposition,” Trump says on-screen. “I’ll get back to you.”
A publicist for Zucker did not immediately respond to questions on Friday afternoon.
Rosalind S. Helderman, Mike DeBonis, Jenna Johnson and Sarah Parnass contributed to this report.
David A. Fahrenthold covers the 2016 presidential campaign for The Washington Post. He has been at the Post since 2000, and previously covered Congress, the federal bureaucracy, the environment, and the D.C. police.
Follow @Fahrenthold
Billy Bush was already polarizing. This makes it much worse.
A caller had a lewd tape of Donald Trump. Then the race to break the story was on.
Reporter David Fahrenthold got a phone call around 11 a.m. Friday from a source with a tip about Donald Trump. The source asked: Would Fahrenthold be interested in seeing some previously unaired video of Trump?
Fahrenthold didn’t hesitate. Within a few moments of watching an outtake of footage from a 2005 segment on “Access Hollywood,” the Washington Post reporter was on the phone, calling Trump’s campaign, “Access Hollywood” and NBC for reaction.
By 4 p.m., his story was causing shock waves.
The recording, of course, was of Trump’s vulgar comments about women as he rode on an “Access Hollywood” bus with the show’s then-host, Billy Bush. With Bush’s encouragement, and an open microphone recording him, Trump describes in crude terms his unsuccessful attempt to seduce a woman named Nancy and brags that his celebrity status enables him to grope women.
Fahrenthold’s story about the recording — which some observers said might deal a death blow to Trump’s presidential campaign — was the second major revelation, or “October surprise,” that came courtesy of an anonymous source. The New York Times last week revealed that Trump took
a $916 million loss on his 1995 taxes, which could have relieved him from paying federal income taxes for as many as 18 years. The Times’ story was based on tax returns supplied by a source whose identity is unknown even to the Times.
Fahrenthold, a 16-year veteran of The Post, said he knows who pointed him to the “Access Hollywood” video, but he will not reveal the identity because he promised anonymity to his tipster. But like many readers, he said he was surprised and shocked by what he saw on the tape.
But this was new, he noted: “It’s not just, ‘Look at her; she’s a 10,’ the kind of thing he used to say on the ‘Howard Stern Show.’ It was more than that. He tells you about his behavior.”
As it happens, Fahrenthold was racing to produce his story in competition with “Access Hollywood” itself. The syndicated show, owned by NBC Universal, had found the Trump recording in its archives and was preparing its own story. NBC News, tipped by “Access Hollywood,” was also aware of the tape and was preparing a story, which it intended to broadcast after the entertainment show aired the recording. It was not clear, however, when “Access Hollywood” and NBC News were planning to go ahead with their stories.
Fahrenthold’s calls to NBC and “Access Hollywood” on Friday sped up their timetables. MSNBC reporter Katy Tur reported on the tape about seven minutes after The Post broke the story online.
Fahrenthold’s story proved to be the most concurrently viewed article in the history of The Post’s website; more than 100,000 people read it simultaneously at one point on Friday. The interest was so heavy that it briefly crashed the servers of the newspaper’s internal tracking system.
The recording’s profane language forced media organizations to decide whether to air it unexpurgated. CNN, among others, left several of Trump’s crude references intact, although it bleeped out an f-word. The Post used dashes to represent two profanities and one crude reference to female anatomy in the text but left Trump’s reference to “tits” uncensored. The newspaper did not bleep or dash out anything in the accompanying video’s audio and subtitles.
Post executive editor Marty Baron said the newspaper’s concerns about the story were “pretty simple. Was the video authentic, and was it relevant? There was never a question about the latter, and David Fahrenthold quickly verified the video’s authenticity.”
As for the recording’s language, he said, “We make our best judgments in weighing taste against clarity about what was said. I think we accomplished that in our approach.”
The story not only damaged Trump but also elicited intense criticism of Bush on social media. Bush, 44, a cousin of former president George W. Bush, is now a co-host of NBC’s “Today” show. Noting that “Today” has a huge following among women, some critics called for Bush’s resignation.
In a statement issued by NBC News late Friday, Bush said, “Obviously I’m embarrassed and ashamed. It’s no excuse, but this happened eleven years ago. I was younger, less mature, and acted foolishly in playing along. I’m very sorry.”
NBC News produces the “Today” show and oversees MSNBC. “Access Hollywood” is part of a separate division, NBC Entertainment.
NBC News declined to comment on Friday. People at the network said there has been no discussion yet about what, if any, discipline Bush may face.
NBC News also delayed action last year when media accounts revealed that lead anchor Brian Williams had told distorted accounts of his reporting on the Iraq War in 2003. (Williams was eventually forced to resign as anchor of “NBC Nightly News” and is now an anchor on MSNBC.)
A spokeswoman for “Access Hollywood” did not respond to a request for comment on Friday.
The quick succession of events left several questions unanswered, among them: Why did a 2005 recording of Trump remain in the “Access Hollywood” archives for so long before becoming public? And what other damaging outtakes, if any, remain in the archives of NBC’s “The Apprentice” and “Celebrity Apprentice,” the reality shows in which Trump starred?
In a statement, Trump did not deny the recording but called it “locker room banter, a private conversation that took place many years ago.” He added, “Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course, not even close. I apologize if anyone was offended.”
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