Entertainment news show Access Hollywood fired back at a report that U.S. President Donald Trump doesn’t believe the infamous recording of him boasting about groping women is authentic.
Hosts Natalie Morales and Kit Hoover addressed the report and the end of Monday night’s show.
“According to the New York Times, President Trump told two people that the Access Hollywood bus tape, the one where he bragged about grabbing women by you-know-what is fake,” Hoover said.
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“Let us make this perfectly clear, the tape is very real. Remember his excuse at the time was ‘Locker room talk.’ He said every one of those words,” Morales told viewers.
According to the newspaper report, the president suggested to a senator, and again to an adviser, this year that tape was not authentic. The newspaper didn’t name the individuals.
The tape, during which Trump says “Grab them by the p***y,” prompted outrage in the month leading up to the U.S. election.
“I’ve said and done things I regret, and the words released today on this more-than-a-decade-old video are one of them,” he said in October 2016.
On Monday, the White House insisted Trump hasn’t changed his tone about the tape.
“The president addressed this. This was litigated and certainly answered during the election by the overwhelming support for the president and the fact that he is sitting here in the Oval Office today,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters. “He’s made his position on that clear, at that time, as have the American people in their support of him.
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“The president hasn’t changed his position, I think of anything that the president questions is it’s the media’s reporting on that accuracy,” Sanders added.
Following Trump’s victory, the controversy led to the Women’s March, which took place in locations around the world.
Last month, women’s group Ultraviolet set up a screen on the Washington Mall near the White House and played the infamous tape to “remind the American people who the president really is” and to mark the anniversary of the leak of the recording.
–with files from Maham Abedi