It’s been nearly nine years since Donald Trump’s infamous “Grab ’em by the p—y” scandal happened, but according to Billy Bush, he told his NBC producer what the president said when it first occurred way back in 2005.
However, if the “Access Hollywood” tape had leaked then, the former “Today” co-host acknowledged that he would’ve been fired by the network anyway for “killing their cash cow.”
“NBC put out an APB, an all points bulletin, on Donald Trump because some former pageant girl, queen, came forward and said he had done something inappropriate, he had said something. And Donald Trump said, ‘I’ve never said or done anything inappropriate with women ever in my life,’” Bush recalled to Rob Lowe on his “Literally!” podcast. “And then NBC, who hates him, sent out these messages to every division of the company: ‘Do you have any tapes? What they really wanted was Mark Burnett’s tape, the guy who ran ‘The Apprentice,’ because there’s outtakes forever — but, ‘Does anyone else have anything of him talking disparagingly about women? We need this, we need this, we need this.’ And my producer at the time was like, ‘Holy s–t. The bus ride. That tape that was like 11 years ago. Wait a minute. That’s the time when Bush called me right after it happened.’”
“The day of the filming in 2005, I called my producer, I said, ‘You’re not going to believe what Trump said. He’s going after Nancy.’ All I said was Nancy O’Dell because I didn’t hear the other stuff. I said, ‘He’s trying to take Nancy furniture shopping to sleep with her. This is crazy. He’s done it again! The guy’s an animal!’ I report it, basically, to my superior, it sits in a desk forever,” he added. “Had that tape leaked out when it actually occurred in 2005, I would’ve been fired for an entirely different reason — killing their cash cow. Trump was a protected, revered source. He was a hundred million dollars in profit for NBC. He was the king of the ratings. A cheap reality show to make. You go make ‘9-1-1,’ it costs a lot of money to make that. ‘The Apprentice’ costs nothing and its ratings were huge.”
Indeed, Season 3 of “The Apprentice” in the spring of 2005 averaged 14 million viewers per episode. After debuting in 2004, Trump would go on to host the reality show for 14 seasons — “Celebrity” iterations included — before leaving the show to Arnold Schwarzenegger for one final season in 2017.
The tape in question also features the now-president saying, “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”
Bush’s story continued: “So my producer, instead of telling me, sends it to the general counsel of NBC and says, ‘I’ve got something, but I don’t know if I can use it because two microphones are on, the camera’s not there, he may not have known he was being recorded’ — and in California if you’re recording, both parties need to know; it’s a dual consent state.”
“They had what they thought was now the one thing — we’ve learned later, nothing takes him out — but this at the time, I think, everybody agreed had to be the thing,” he concluded. “So, whatever, whoever’s the collateral damage around it, tough s–t. The bigger mission is this man not becoming president.”
Elsewhere in the podcast interview, Bush told Lowe which of his famous friends stuck by his side during the fallout: Julie Bowen, Michael Strahan, Cindy Crawford, Suzanne Somers, Dennis Quaid, Tony Robbins, Eric Stonestreet and “Modern Family” co-creator Steve Levitan.
Bush is currently the host of “Extra” after being fired from “Today” in 2016. He joined “Access Hollywood” in 2001 and hosted it from 2004 until his promotion to the daytime talk show.
