It’s been nearly nine years since Donald Trump’s infamous “grab ‘em for the P-Y” scandal happened, but according to Billy Bush, he told his NBC producer what the president said when it first occurred in 2005.
However, if the “Access Hollywood” tape had been leaked then, the former “Today” co-host acknowledged that he would have been fired by the network for “killing their cash cow.”
“NBC put out an APB, an all-points bulletin, on Donald Trump because a former pageant queen came forward and said he had done something inappropriate, he said something. And Donald Trump said, ‘I have never said or done anything inappropriate with women ever in my life,'” Bush recalled to steal his “Literally!” podcast. “And then NBC, who hates him, sent these messages to every division in the company: ‘Do you have any tapes? What they really wanted was the tape of Mark Burnett, the guy who ran ‘The Apprentice,’ because there’s surplus forever—but, ‘Does anyone else have anything of him talking about women? We need this, we need this, we need this.’ And my producer at the time was like, ‘Holy S–T.'”
“On the day of filming in 2005, I called my producer, 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 report it, basically, to my superior, it sits on a desk forever,” he added. “If that tape had leaked when it actually did in 2005, I would have been fired for a totally different reason—killing their cash cow. Trump was a protected and revered source. He was a hundred million dollars in profit for NBC. He cost a lot of money.
Indeed, the third season of “The Apprentice” in the spring of 2005 averaged 14 million viewers per episode. After debuting in 2004, Trump would host the reality show for 14 seasons—including “celebrity” iterations—before leaving the show to Arnold Schwarzenegger for a final season in 2017.
The tape in question also features the now-president saying, “I don’t even expect it. 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 at NBC and says, ‘I have something, but I don’t know if I can use it because two microphones are on, the camera isn’t 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 learned later, nothing drove him out—but that at the time, I think, everyone agreed it had to be the thing,” he concluded. “So whatever it is, whoever the collateral damage is around him, S-T.
Elsewhere in the podcast interview, Bush told Lowe which of her famous friends arrested by her 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.
