Melania Trump dismisses Donald Trump's sexual assault comments as 'boys talk'

Ms Trump broke her silence in a rare interview, putting blame for Mr Trump's comments on Billy Bush and the Clinton campaign

Feliks Garcia
New York
Tuesday 18 October 2016 03:45 BST
Melania Trump dismisses husband's leaked audio as 'boy's talk'

Melania Trump came to her husband’s defence in her first interview since the leak of a 2005 tape that captured what she referred to as “boys talk”, where the Republican presidential nominee boasted this his celebrity status let him sexually assault women.

She wrote off the near-dozen accusations of sexual assault that emerged in the last week as nothing more than “lies” orchestrated by the Clinton campaign.

“I don’t know that person that would talk that way, and that he would say that kind of stuff in private,” she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper Monday evening, explaining the he was "egged on" by then Access Hollywood host Billy Bush. “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.”

She added: “Sometimes I say I have two boys at home – I have my young son [Barron, 10,] and I have my husband. But I know how some men talk, and that's how I saw it, yes.” Mr Trump is currently 70 – he was 59 in the 2005 video.

In the tape, Donald Trump joked about kissing and groping women to Bush during an Access Hollywood filming. Mr Trump boasted that he could grab women “by the p***y” as Bush laughed along. Ms Trump condemned the “unacceptable and offensive” remarks a day after the tape was broadcast.

Donald Trump caught on tape talking about sexually assaulting women: "Grab 'em by the pussy"

Still, she maintained that she believed Mr Trump’s numerous denials of the accusations from almost a dozen women since the 7 October tape leak.

“I believe my husband. I believe my husband,” she said. “This was all organised from the opposition. And with the details … did they ever check the background of these women? They don’t have any facts.”

Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump in most of the major polls by an average of seven points, according to RealClear Politics.

Mr Trump has attributed his drop in the polls to media bias that fuels a supposedly rigged electoral system. Critics of Mr Trump say his focus on the “rigged” election are simply a method to distract from the multiple victims who came forward.

Ms Trump agrees with the assessment. She issued a harsh critique for the political media in her interview that echoed many of her husband’s statements.

“I didn’t expect media would be so dishonest and so mean. I didn’t expect that,” she said. “Also for me, from the beginning, I never had one correct story – one honest story."

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