Melania Trump says her husband was 'egged on' by Billy Bush in leaked video

October 17, 2016 at 19:59

She told CNN that Donald Trump was having ‘boy talk’ and was ‘lead on’ by Bush in hot-mic tape of him bragging about using fame for sexual advances

In two interviews – her first since the release of a hot-mic tape showing her husband boasting about how his celebrity allows him to grab women “by the pussy” – Melania Trump has claimed that he was “egg[ed] on” and said that he has apologized to her.

They were kind of – ah – boy talk,” she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper, in an interview that will air in full Monday evening. “He was lead on. Like egg on [sic] from the host to say, uh, dirty and bad stuff.”

In a separate interview, scheduled to air Tuesday morning on Fox News’ Fox & Friends, Melania said that “Those words, they were offensive to me and they were inappropriate.” She said that Trump had apologized to her, “and I ... accept his apology. And we’re moving on,” she said.

“This is not the man that I know,” she continued.

On CNN, Melania told Cooper said that she was “surprised” when she heard the tape, and said “I don’t know that person would talk that way. And that he would say that kind of stuff in private.”

She continued: “I’ve heard many different stuff, boys talk. The boys, the way they talk when they grow up and they want to sometimes show each other, ‘Oh, this and that,’ and talking about the girls, but I was surprised, of course.”

The damning 2005 recording was released on 8 October. In it, Donald Trump bragged about using his fame to “fuck” women and grope them without their consent. “When you’re a star they let you do it,” he is recorded saying. “You can do anything.”

It caused a storm of controversy. Trump and his supporters at first dismissed the recording as “locker-room talk”, but over the following days a growing number of women came forward to put their names to allegations that the Republican nominee for president had groped or attempted to kiss them without their consent.

On Sunday, Cathy Heller became the ninth woman to come forward with her story, telling the Guardian that Trump “took my hand, grabbed me, and went for the lips” at a brunch at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida in 1997.