Ivanka Trump defends her father, insisting he is "not a groper"

Interview with network television come as campaign pushes back against New York Times article

She has rushed to her father's defence

The daughter of Donald Trump has found herself defending his record on dealing with women, insisting he’s “not a groper” and has a record of nurturing women in the workplace.

In a first substantive interview about her father’s run for the White House, Ivanka Trump, 34, pushed back against a front-page New York Times article published at the weekend that was a harsh take-down of Mr Trump’s interactions with women over the years.

Her father “had total respect for women”, Ms Trump told CBS on Wednesday, conceding that she had read the Times piece and had been “bothered” by it.

The article included references to a former female employee of Trump interests in Atlantic City who told the paper of a “very traumatic incident” that allegedly involved her ultimate boss attempting to grope her under a dinner table.

“Look, I’m not in every interaction my father has, but he’s not a groper,” Ms Trump, who works as an executive vice president for her father’s business empire, commented. “It’s not who he is. And I’ve known my father obviously my whole life and he has total respect for women.”

Parting with convention, Mr Trump did not ignore the article but rather spent the first days of this week lambasting it and its authors, a reaction that helped propel it to become the most read piece in the newspaper for a year.

He was helped when one of the key figures in the piece, a former model and one-time girlfriend of the tycoon, Rowanne Brewer Lane, asserted that her remarks to the reporters had been taken out of context and were misleading.

“It is libelous, because it was factually inaccurate,” Corey Lewandowski, the Trump campaign spokesman, told CNN “They had the opportunity to get it right, they chose not to get it right.” Mr Trump in a Twitter message on Tuesday evening said it was time for one of the reporters who wrote it, Michael Barbaro, to resign.

But the newspaper has not backed off from the report. “We really stand by our story, we believe we quoted her fairly and accurately and that the story really speaks for itself,“ Mr Barbaro said on CNN.

“I was bothered by it, but it’s largely been discredited since,” Ms Trump, who is married to Jared Kushner, a prominent New York property developer, said of the piece.

“Most of the time when stories are inaccurate they’re not discredited, and I will be frustrated by that, but in this case I think they went so far,” she continued. “They had such a strong thesis and created facts to reinforce it and, you know, I think that narrative has been playing out now and there’s backlash in that regard.”

Her contention that her father had blazed a trail even back in the 1980s by promoting women to top positions his organisation was in fact acknowledged by the report’s authors. Notably, they highlighted the rise of Barbara Res to become head of construction of Trump Tower.

Ms Res, however, has spoken publicly of times when he was sexist towards female employees, including comments made to her about her gain in weight.

As Mr Trump transitions from the primary races to the general election, he faces a stiff task winning over women voters. The most recent polls suggested that more than two thirds of women nationally disapprove of him. Unless he can soften those numbers - women tend to vote in bigger numbers than men in the US - his path to the White House will be very narrow.