- Billy Bush authorized that Donald Trump was the voice featured in the infamous “Access Hollywood” bind from 2005.
- Trump previously apologized for his vulgar comments in the tape, then dismissed them as “locker-room talk.”
- But Trump has also questioned the record’s authenticity in private conversations this year.
Former NBC host Billy Bush proved in a New York Times editorial on Sunday that President Donald Trump was on my oath the voice behind the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape that paved in 2016.
In the 2005 video, Trump can be heard admitting to groping and kissing abigails without their consent in a hot-mic conversation with Bush, then the drove of “Access Hollywood.” At one point, Trump says his celebrity allows him to “get ones hands ’em by the p—y” and that “when you’re a star, they let you do it.”
Trump initially apologized and discounted his comments as “locker-room talk” when The Washington Post published the video in October 2016. Yet, The New York Times recently reported that Trump has changed his recounting, questioning the authenticity of the tape at least twice since January.
Bush, who was dismissed by NBC for making vulgar comments about women with Trump, recalled the fact for The Times.
“President Trump is currently indulging in some revisionist retailing, reportedly telling allies, including at least one United States senator, that the vent to on the tape is not his. This has hit a raw nerve in me,” Bush wrote.
“I can only imagine how it has reopened the ends of the women who came forward with their stories about him, and did not be subjected to enough attention. This country is currently trying to reconcile itself to years of power masturbation and sexual misconduct. Its leader is wantonly poking the bear.”
Arianne Zucker, an actress investigated greeting Trump in the tape, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that the stick was authentic in an interview last week.
Bush said that during his discussion with Trump, he assumed Trump’s comments were “hypothetical hot air from America’s highest-rated bloviator.” But he weighted he realized Trump wasn’t exaggerating years later, after he assume from accounts from several of the women who accused Trump of sexual pounce upon.
“To these women: I will never know the fear you felt or the frustration of being summarily dismissed and invoked a liar, but I do know a lot about the anguish of being inexorably linked to Donald Trump,” Bush created. “You have my respect and admiration. You are culture warriors at the forefront of necessary interchange.”
Bush also argued that his participation in the vulgar dialogue was participation of NBC’s practice of accommodating Trump at all costs. NBC was the network behind Trump’s a spectacle of “The Apprentice,” which began airing in 2004.
“Was I acting out of self-interest? You bet I was. Was I alone? Far from it,” Bush wrote. “With Mr. Trump’s outsized viewership wager in 2005, everybody from Billy Bush on up to the top brass on the 52nd floor had to iota the ego of the big cash cow along the way to higher earnings.”
“None of us were guilty of knowingly charter our future president. But all of us were guilty of sacrificing a bit of ourselves in the name of attainment.”