Billy Bush, the man with Donald Trump when he made the lewd comments about women, is speaking for the first time about the notorious tape that also features him laughing with Trump.
“Looking back on what was said on that bus, I wish I had changed the topic…,” Bush told the Hollywood Reporter of the tape, that was recorded in 2005 and later leaked to the Washington Post in October 2016. “[Trump] liked TV and competition. I could’ve said, ‘Can you believe the ratings on whatever?’ I didn’t have the strength of character to do it.”
The tape that featured Trump saying various terrible things about a woman, alleging Bush’s Access Hollywood co-host Nancy O’Dell.
“You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful, I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss,” Trump was saying on the tape. “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the p****. You can do anything.”
Bush had signed a lucrative deal with NBC’s Today show and when the tape was leaked was axed after it. He could be seen laughing and encouraging Trump.
“I put together an apology right away… I told people that I was ashamed and embarrassed,” Bush said of what happened after the tape leaked. “And I was. So in the beginning, I thought, ‘OK, we’ll go and own up to this moment. Then I got home, and it started to become apparent that [I] would not be returning [to Today]. It hurt a lot, and I fell apart.”
Despite the Tape scandal Bush still eyes a TV comeback, “There’s a process that needs to take place because you just can’t come back; it has to have changed you in some way,” he told the Hollywood Reporter. “But I plan to return to the job that I love, which is television, communicating, interviewing people.”
Connect with us