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Last week, Donald Trump said that it wasn’t his voice on the now-infamous “Grab ’em by the p*ssy” Access Hollywood tape. Now, Billy Bush has come forward to say “Of course he said it. And we laughed along…”
The former Today co-host and Access Hollywood reporter went on to say in a New York Times article, “Along with Donald Trump and me, there were seven other guys present on the bus at the time, and every single one of us assumed we were listening to a crass standup act. He was performing. Surely, we thought, none of this was real.”
Bush’s op-ed comes before his upcoming appearance on Monday night’s Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Although Bush issued an apology for his part in the Access Hollywood tape, he lost his job at Today about a week later. In his article, Bush recalls reading about the women coming forward accusing Trump of harassment as he revisits the Access Hollywood tape aftermath. He says that this is a moment in American life that is “painful for many women” and how he knows “the anguish of being inexorably linked to Donald Trump.”
“President Trump is currently indulging in some revisionist history, reportedly telling allies, including at least one United States senator, that the voice on the tape is not his,” he writes. “This has hit a raw nerve in me.”
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In regards to sexual misconduct and harassment, he goes on to say that he has faith of exposing injustices and hopes that “the current media drama of who did what to whom will give way to a constructive dialogue between mature men and women in the workplace and beyond.”
There is a regretful tone in his article as he says “Today is about reckoning and reawakening, and I hope it reaches all the guys on the bus.”
He ends by getting personal and calls this last year an “odyssey” for himself. “I know that I don’t need the accouterments of fame to know God and be happy, he said. “After everything over the last year, I think I’m a better man and father to my three teenage daughters — far from perfect, but better.”
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