On Monday night, Melania Trump allowed, in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, that she was surprised to see her husband, Donald, bragging in video outtakes from “Access Hollywood” about grabbing women by their genitals against their will. The video was shot in 2005, several months after she married Trump, but, she said, “That is not the man I know.” She figured that it was Billy Bush’s fault; as the show’s host, he had worked to “lead on” and “egg on” her husband to get him to “say dirty and bad stuff.” It was “boy talk,” she said, and yet she insisted that her adult husband didn’t talk that way. “That is why I was surprised,” she said. “But I was not surprised that the tape came out. I was not surprised about that.”

“Why?” Cooper asked.

“It’s many people from the opposite side,” Trump said. She was smiling broadly now, beaming with knowingness. “They want to damage the campaign. And why now? Why after so many years? Why three weeks before the election?” (The video came out four and a half weeks before the election, which is three weeks from today.)

She believed that NBC and “Access Hollywood” were in on it, as was the media more generally. “It was left-wing, and left-wing media,” she said. “And you can see that the way it comes out. Everything was organized. Every Friday, every Friday, something comes out. And so they play, they play, they play. And it’s hour after hour. I watched TV, it was hour after hour, bashing him. Because they want to influence the American people how to vote. And they are influencing in the wrong way.”

Cooper mentioned that excerpts from her husband’s tax records had, like the “Access Hollywood” video, come out a few days before a debate. “You’re saying that’s not a coincidence,” he said.

“No, that was all organized,” Trump replied. “Yes. They planned it that way. Because they don’t want to talk, the opposition doesn’t want to talk about WikiLeaks and the e-mails and Benghazi”—she pronounced that city’s name as if it were a kind of candy—“so they said, ‘Let’s do something so we will hurt his campaign.’ ” She had a further piece of evidence for the plotting, the collusion, and the basic dishonesty of the press: “When did we hear or read any great stories from, about my husband? Or about me?” In a normal world—or maybe one in which no one was “organized”—the airwaves would, presumably, be full of those.

There are echoes, here, of Hillary Clinton’s reference, in 1998, when first fending off reports of Monica Lewinsky, to “a vast right-wing conspiracy,” which pointed to a real coördinated effort, but did not explain her husband’s missteps. It might be more accurate to say that Melania Trump offered a booming amplification of that sentiment—and a crass one, despite (or consistent with, depending on one’s taste in furniture) the gilt-and-marble décor of the Trump Tower penthouse where she met with Cooper. Melania Trump’s accusations come at a moment when the electorate is being subjected to a barrage of charges from her husband and his campaign that the election is being stolen. Donald Trump has been making that claim at loud, angry rallies, suggesting that he might not accept the election results. He is preparing a long, potentially destabilizing complaint about the legitimacy of a Clinton Administration. There is a hint of violence there, and yet Melania Trump made it clear that she didn’t regard that rhetoric as simple boy talk. When Cooper said, “Your husband is saying he believes the election is rigged, and that there is a lot of forces trying to rig it. Do you feel that as well?,” Trump nodded emphatically.

“Well, I see it—how the media is portraying. I see how they’re reporting it,” she said. They weren’t talking about what they ought to be talking about and she repeated that, in terms of the attacks, everything was “organized.”

“Organized by—the media, Clinton?” Cooper asked. “Media, Clinton,” she replied. And were the media and Clinton working together? “Yes, of course.”

“I didn’t expect that the media would be so dishonest,” she said, as she spoke about its tendency to report the things her husband said. What was also striking was how ready this Trump, like her husband, was to disparage women—women everywhere. She mentioned the stories about her that she didn’t like—some of them have indeed had inaccuracies about her past, as her lawyers have noted—but she said that not a single one was true. And she saw a pattern: “Every story—a female! It’s a female reporter.” The People magazine reporter who wrote about Trump grabbing her and forcibly kissing her? A liar, as proved by her assertion that Melania Trump had once greeted her in a friendly manner on the street, when, according to Trump, she was an inconsequential. (There was a letter from her lawyer on that point alone.) The other women who said that her husband did such things were lying, too. “I believe my husband. This was all organized,” she said. Then she asked, “Did they ever check the background of these women?”

She knew the type: they would come up to him, asking for jobs, offering their phone numbers and, Trump implied, their bodies. “Inappropriate stuff from women—and they know he’s married!” They did it “in front of me”; she had confronted some of them.

In contrast, her husband, a “gentleman,” employed and supported women. Yes, she said, “my husband is real. He’s raw.” He’s susceptible to that “boy talk,” which she defined as “boys, the way they talk when they grow up, they want to sometimes show each other this and that about the girls.” When Cooper tried to get her to focus on the notion that what Trump had described doing in the video amounted to sexual assault, she kept insisting that his exchange with Bush best fell under the rubric of the behavior of “teen-agers”—a broad insult to that age group, never mind that Trump was fifty-nine at the time. She presented it all as somehow endearing, along the lines of the behavior of her eleven-year-old son, Barron: “Sometimes I said, I have two boys at home.”

At another point, she dismissed speculation that she was discontent with a husband so contemptuous of women as being the idle talk of celebrities, “or people, they think they’re celebrities”—a dig at those she sees as B-listers. She said that they should “take care of their own families,” as she believed she was taking care of her own.

And that is the problem with Melania Trump. Her fierce sense of herself—her willingness to fight for her own reputation, if for nothing else—is compelling to watch. (To that extent, the interview with Cooper might have helped her husband.) But what keeps this defiance from being admirable or even, in the end, all that appealing is that it is so fundamentally ungenerous, so heedless of the harm that might be done to others. In speaking about how she had been portrayed, she may have been referring to “Saturday Night Live” ’s “Melanianade” skit, which imagined her and her “ladies” acting out a Beyoncé-inspired dance of Donald-deploring female solidarity. She made a persuasive argument that this was not the correct measure of her inner life. Her interview expressed a fixation, instead, with stories of the riggers and the media plotters seeking to deny her husband power. “People think and talk about me, like, ‘Oh, Melania, poor Melania,’ ” she told Cooper. “Don’t feel sorry for me.” It’s a deal.