“Of course he said it.” Billy Bush confirms Donald Trump’s infamous “Grab ’em by the pussy” comments

“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.”

Billy Bush, the former host of the US TV Show Access Hollywood, has confirmed that it was US President Donald Trump who made lewd remarks about women, including the infamous phrase “grab ’em by the pussy”, in footage from 2005 that was leaked ahead of the presidential election last year. In the footage, Trump can be heard saying:  “I moved on her and I failed. I’ll admit it. I did try and f--- her. She was married. “I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there. “And she was married. Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything. She’s totally changed her look.” Later in the conversation, he spoke about his fondness for aggressively kissing women, saying: “I don’t even wait,” before later adding that he would “grab ‘em by the pussy". Although Trump issued an apology for the comments in the wake of the scandal last year, there have since been a number of reports in which he suggested the tape could be a hoax. Those suggestions have been rubbished in an article written for the New York Times by Billy Bush, who said that Trump’s recent reported denials of the comments has “hit a raw nerve in me” and accused Trump of “indulging in some revisionist history”. “He said it. ‘Grab ’em by the pussy’,” Bush wrote. “Of course he said it. And we laughed along, without a single doubt that this was hypothetical hot air from America’s highest-rated bloviator. 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. “We now know better.” In the piece, Bush also expressed his respect and admiration for numerous women who made public allegations of harassment against Trump in the lead-up to last year’s presidential election. “To these women: I will never know the fear you felt or the frustration of being summarily dismissed and called a liar, but I do know a lot about the anguish of being inexorably linked to Donald Trump,” Bush wrote. “You have my respect and admiration. You are culture warriors at the forefront of necessary change.” You can read Billy Bush’s op-ed in the New York Times in full here.