what mr. trump said

“They made false statements about me. I never met them. I never met these people. And what did they do, what did they do? They took money in order to say bad things.”

the facts

This is misleading.

Mr. Trump said he was accused of sexual misconduct by four or five women “who got paid a lot of money to make up stories about me," and whom he claimed he had never met. He then contradicted himself and said that he “knew them a long time ago. Fifteen years ago, 20 years ago.”

More than a dozen women have accused him of sexual misconduct. Of those women, he has met at least six, as The New York Times reported last year:

A sixth woman, the makeup artist Jill Harth, said Mr. Trump groped her in 1992 and she filed a lawsuit against him in 1997. She later withdrew that complaint as part of a settlement of a different lawsuit with Mr. Trump.

The president’s contention that the women were paid to falsely accuse him of sexual misconduct distorts news reports about financial donations to some accusers.

The Times’s Kenneth Vogel reported in December that political partisans raised money to support accusers who came forward with charges of sexual misconduct about Mr. Trump and members of Congress.