Billy Bush, whose television career unraveled a decade ago with the release of the so-called “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Donald J. Trump bantered with him about sexual assault, is joining Fox News as a contributor.
The exchange with Mr. Trump, which was recorded in 2005, emerged in the closing weeks of the 2016 presidential election, which Mr. Trump won despite the political fallout from the clip.
But the consequences for Mr. Bush, now 54, a nephew of former President George H.W. Bush and a cousin of former President George W. Bush, were severe.
The scandal cost him his job as an anchor of the “Today” show on NBC just a few months after he had joined the flagship morning program and prompted Mr. Bush to issue an apology in which he said he was “embarrassed and ashamed” of his actions.
In a statement on Tuesday released through Fox News Media, Mr. Bush said he was excited for the opportunity to share “my perspective on the people, ideas and moments shaping today’s culture … as well as the ones trying to undo it!”
Mr. Bush will make his debut at 8 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday on “Jesse Watters Primetime” and will appear across all Fox platforms, the company said.
While Mr. Bush was making chitchat with Mr. Trump on a tour bus before taping a segment for the celebrity news show “Access Hollywood” in 2005, Mr. Trump made vulgar comments about women to him and bragged about groping them.
“You can do anything,” Mr. Trump said during the three-minute recording, which was captured on the set of “Days of Our Lives,” where Mr. Trump was making a cameo appearance.
Mr. Bush, who was in his first full year as an anchor of “Access Hollywood,” guffawed at Mr. Trump’s remarks in the video, which was first obtained by The Washington Post about a month before the 2016 presidential election.
The video became not only a political bombshell but also a legal one for Mr. Trump, whom more than a dozen women have accused of sexual misconduct over the years before he was president.
In 2023, a federal jury in New York found Mr. Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll, who said that Mr. Trump assaulted her in a dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in the mid-1990s.
Mr. Trump was ordered to pay Ms. Carroll nearly $90 million in damages, a judgment that he is trying to fight.
While Mr. Trump initially apologized for the “Access Hollywood” tape, saying that the words in the recording did not reflect him, he later suggested to allies that it may not have been him on the tape after all.
Mr. Bush, weighing in on the scandal in a 2017 essay in The New York Times, said Mr. Trump had engaged in revisionist history.
“Of course he said it,” Mr. Bush wrote. “And we laughed along, without a single doubt that this was hypothetical hot air from America’s highest-rated bloviator.”
Mr. Bush expressed regret over his role in the tape, which he said must have been traumatic for the women who have accused Mr. Trump of sexual misconduct.
“To these women: I will never know the fear you felt or the frustration of being summarily dismissed and called a liar,” he wrote, “but I do know a lot about the anguish of being inexorably linked to Donald Trump.”
After the scandal, Mr. Bush spent five years as a host of “Extra,” the long-running syndicated entertainment news show, and started a podcast, “Hot Mics With Billy Bush.”
The post Billy Bush Joins Fox News a Decade After ‘Access Hollywood’ Tape Scandal appeared first on New York Times.
