Melania Trump also said Billy Bush egged on her husband to say bad things. | Getty Melania Trump on dredging up Bill Clinton's infidelities: 'They're asking for it'

Melania Trump on Monday suggested it’s fair for the media and Donald Trump to bring up former President Bill Clinton’s infidelities during his wife’s presidential campaign, saying, "They're asking for it."

“Well, if they bring up my past, why not?” Melania Trump asked, according to an excerpt of her interview with Fox News’ Ainsley Earhardt.


The New York Post published nude images of Melania Trump from the 1990s earlier this year, including a front page image with the headline “The Ogle Office.”

And during the Republican presidential primary, a pro-Ted Cruz super PAC pushed an ad that featured a nude Melania Trump from a 2000 photo shoot with British GQ ahead of the Utah caucuses. “Meet Melania Trump. Your next first lady,” text over the image read.

Based on coverage of her, Melania Trump contended, it’s only right that Hillary Clinton’s husband undergoes similar media scrutiny.

“They're asking for it. They started,” Melania Trump told Fox News. “They started from the — from the beginning of the campaign putting my — my picture from modeling days. That was my modeling days and I'm proud what I did. I worked very hard.”

Melania Trump also described her husband’s rhetoric from a leaked 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape in which the real estate mogul was heard boasting about sexually assaulting women with impunity as “offensive” and “inappropriate.” But she maintained that the man in the video from more than a decade ago “is not the man that I know.”

“Those words, they were offensive to me and they were inappropriate. And he apologized to me,” she said. “And I expect — I accept his apology. And we are moving on.”

Melania Trump also discussed the tape with CNN's Anderson Cooper in an interview airing Monday evening, during which she called her husband's comments inappropriate, but dismissed them as "boy talk." She also accused former NBC host Billy Bush of egging Trump on in the conversation caught on tape.

"As you can see from the tape, the cameras were not on. It was only a mic," she said. "I wonder if they even knew that the mic was on because [it was] kind of boy talk and he was lead on, like, egg on from the host to say dirty and bad stuff."

Prior to the interview airing, NBC announced that Billy Bush was officially out as co-host of The Today Show.

Asked if she had heard her husband speak that way before, Melania responded: "No. That's why I was surprised. Because I said, like, I don't know that person that would talk that way, and that he would say that kind of stuff in private. I 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 yeah, I was surprised, of course."

Calling accusations of sexual assault against her husband "lies," Melania Trump went on to accuse the media of collaborating with the Hillary Clinton campaign to bring down his campaign.

"It was left wing and left-wing media, and you could see that and the way it comes out is everything was organized," she said of the controversy that has swirled around the Trump campaign. "This was all organized from the opposition."