# Access Hollywood Tape On **October 7, 2016**, one month before the presidential election, the [[Washington Post]] published a 2005 recording in which [[Donald Trump]], then the host of *The Apprentice*, described grabbing women by the genitals. The recording had been made on an *Access Hollywood* tour bus while Trump and the show's host Billy Bush — both wearing live microphones — arrived at the *Days of Our Lives* set for a cameo and a promotional segment; the two met the actress Arianne Zucker immediately afterward. The reporter was [[David Fahrenthold]]. The verbatim text is on [[Donald Trump - grab them]]. The tape is the single most consequential media disclosure of the [[2016 Presidential Election]], and its interest to this knowledge base is less the content than the **outcome**: it was survivable. ## The 48 hours - **~11 a.m. ET, October 7** — A source delivers a copy of the recording to the *Post*. - **~4 p.m. ET, October 7** — The *Post* publishes the video and transcript. NBC News posts its own story minutes later. - **~4:30 p.m. ET, October 7** — Less than an hour after the tape lands, [[WikiLeaks]] begins publishing the first tranche of some 2,000 hacked emails belonging to Clinton campaign chair [[John Podesta]] — the opening of a release schedule that would run daily until the election. See [[DNC Hack]] and [[Russian Election Interference]]. - **Evening, October 7** — Trump issues a written statement calling the remarks "locker room banter, a private conversation that took place many years ago," says he apologizes "if anyone was offended," and invokes Bill Clinton. - **Shortly after midnight, October 8** — Trump posts a recorded video apology: *"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. ... I said it, I was wrong, and I apologize."* The same video reframes the story as a distraction and attacks the Clintons. - **October 7–11** — Republican officeholders begin rescinding endorsements, among them Rep. [[Jason Chaffetz]]. Speaker Paul Ryan says he will no longer defend Trump but does not withdraw his endorsement. - **October 9** — The second presidential debate proceeds as scheduled at Washington University in St. Louis. - **November 8** — Trump wins the election. ## Why this matters **It established the survivability threshold.** The tape was, on its face, campaign-ending: a recorded, undisputed, first-person description of sexual assault, released a month before the vote, with the candidate's own party publicly defecting. He won anyway. Every subsequent calculation about what the Republican coalition would tolerate was made in the shadow of that result — and so was every subsequent calculation by Trump about whether a disclosure needed to be survived at all rather than simply denied. The apology video of October 8, 2016 is the last time he conceded a wrongdoing of this kind on camera. **The same-day WikiLeaks release is the clearest single data point in the 2016 information-operation record.** The timing — under an hour — is documented rather than inferred, and the effect was to split the news cycle in half on the worst day of Trump's campaign. Whether the release was timed deliberately is a separate question from whether it was timed; the sequence itself is on the record. See [[DNC Hack]]. **It is the origin point for the "locker room talk" defense structure** later reused across the right: reclassify documented conduct as private speech, concede offense rather than act, and attack the accuser's allies. The frame recurs in the [[Stormy Daniels Hush Money Payment]] and [[E. Jean Carroll Defamation Verdicts]] records, where the same conduct was adjudicated rather than merely reported. ## Aftermath - Billy Bush lost his job at NBC's *Today* in the weeks after the tape's release. - Trump acknowledged the voice was his in October 2016. Reporting in 2017 described him privately questioning the recording's authenticity, including to a Republican senator — prompting Bush to state publicly that the voice was "of course" Trump's. - The tape is cited in [[Women's March 2017]] organizing and remains the most-referenced single artifact in this vault's [[Misogyny]] material. ## See Also - [[Donald Trump - grab them]] — the verbatim quote page - [[2016 Presidential Election]] · [[DNC Hack]] · [[Russian Election Interference]] - [[David Fahrenthold]] · [[Washington Post]] · [[WikiLeaks]] - [[Misogyny]] · [[Stormy Daniels Hush Money Payment]] · [[E. Jean Carroll Defamation Verdicts]]