Former Access Hollywood anchor Billy Bush says he warned NBC that President Donald Trump had gone after his cohost a decade before his “grab ’em by the p—y” remarks nearly derailed his presidential campaign.
On a bus ride to film an episode of the show in 2005, Trump told Bush he had pursued his co-host, Nancy O’Dell, but failed.
“I moved on her, and I failed,” he said. “I’ll admit it. … I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping.”
It was during this exchange that Trump made his now-infamous remark, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the p—y.”
On the Literally! With Rob Lowe SiriusXM podcast, Bush recalled that he went to his producer immediately after shooting wrapped.
“The day of the filming in 2005, I called my producer [and] said, ‘You’re not gonna believe what Trump said. He is going after Nancy,’” Bush said.
Bush, however, only noted Trump’s remarks about his cohost—he did not mention the president’s crude remarks about women’s genitals, saying he had not processed “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!’” Bush said.
Bush started at Access Hollywood in 2004 and, in May 2016, was promoted to co-host the third hour of the Today show. He lost his job only months later after full details of the exchange with Trump became public.
But Bush said the warning “sat in a desk forever” because, had the footage leaked at the time, “I would’ve been fired for an entirely different reason—killing NBC’s cash cow.”
At the time, Trump was still the ringmaster of NBC’s juggernaut reality franchise The Apprentice, which had premiered in January 2004 and averaged more than 20 million viewers a week—ratings that delivered massive profits to the network.
“Trump was a protected, revered source,” he added. “He was a hundred-million-dollar profit for NBC. He was the king of the ratings.”
Bush, by contrast, was only a year into his stint as co-anchor of Access Hollywood.
The incendiary footage gathered dust until October 7, 2016, just 32 days before Election Day, when The Washington Post revealed the contents of what would instantly be dubbed “the Access Hollywood tape.”
The revelation rocked the race, but Trump ultimately weathered the uproar, winning the White House in November.
Bush described the frantic scavenger hunt for incriminating Trump footage as his campaign for president gained steam.
NBC execs, he said, put out “an A.P.B., all points bulletin, on Donald Trump” after a former pageant contestant accused him of misconduct.
Trump’s response—“I’ve never said or done anything inappropriate with women ever in my life”—only fueled the search, prompting the network’s bosses to send out emails across every division.
“What they really wanted was Mark Burnett’s tape, the guy who ran The Apprentice, because there’s outtakes forever,” Bush recalled. “But [they asked], ‘Does anyone else have anything of him talking disparagingly about women? We need this.’”
That call jogged one producer’s memory, Bush said. “My producer at the time was like, ‘Holy s–t. The bus ride. That tape, that was like 11 years ago. That’s the time when Bush called me right after it happened.’”
The Daily Beast asked NBC for comment but had not received a response at the time of publication.
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