Donald Trump was having ‘boy talk’ and was ‘led on’ by Bush in hot-mic tape of him bragging about using fame for sexual advances, says candidate’s wife

Melania Trump has dismissed her husband’s sexually aggressive language as “boy talk”, insisting his remarks do not reflect “the man I know”, and said she does not believe that he has assaulted any women.

In her first interviews since the release of a hot-mic tape in which her husband boasts about how his celebrity allows him to grab women “by the pussy” she also revealed Trump had apologised to her and the couple are now “moving on”.

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

'You can do anything': Trump brags on tape about using fame to get women Read more

Melania Trump joined with her husband in alleging a wide-ranging media conspiracy against the Trump campaign. “It was the media, it was NBC, it was Access Hollywood, it was the left-leaning media,” she said. “The way it comes out is very organized ... the opposition doesn’t want to talk Wikileaks and the emails and Benghazi and all the other stuff, they don’t want to talk about it, so they said ‘let’s do something to hurt [Trump’s] campaign instead’.”

In a separate interview, scheduled to air Tuesday morning on Fox News’ Fox & Friends, Melania Trump said that “those words, they were offensive to me and they were inappropriate.” She said that Donald 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 Trump told Cooper 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 try 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. Donald 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 Donald Trump “took my hand, grabbed me, and went for the lips” at a brunch at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida in 1997.