Melania Trump defends husband, calls lewd comments ‘boy talk’

The Washington Post

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s wife, Melania, defended her husband from accusations of misogyny and sexual assault Monday and classified controversial lewd comments he made as “boy talk.”

Melania Trump has remained largely out of the spotlight as several women have accused the GOP nominee of sexual assault and harassment, which began after a lewd 2005 video surfaced in which Trump bragged about being able to grab women against their will because he is a celebrity.

During an interview with CNN, Melania said that she felt her husband was “egged on” by TV personality Billy Bush, who was NBC’s “Access Hollywood” host at the time, who was also in the video.

“I said to my husband that, you know, the language was unappropriate (sic). It’s not acceptable. And I was surprised because that is not the man that I know,” she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “And as you can see from the tape, the cameras were not on. It was only a mic. And I wonder if they even knew that the mic was on. Because they were kind of — ah — boy talk. And he was led on, like egged on, from the host to say dirty and bad stuff.”

Bush has since been suspended from NBC’s “Today,” where he was a co-host.

Melania said that she was surprised because she had not heard Trump use language like that before.

“I’ve heard many different stuff, ‘boys talk,’ the boys, the way they talk when they grow up. And they want to sometimes show each other, ‘Oh this and that,’ and talking about the girls,” she said. “But I was surprised, of course.”