Washington Post Releases Access Hollywood Tape

On October 7, 2016, exactly one month before the presidential election, Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold published a 2005 video recording of Donald Trump making sexually aggressive comments about women. The recording was made on an Access Hollywood bus as Trump and television host Billy Bush traveled to tape a cameo appearance on Days of Our Lives. Trump was wearing a microphone, and the cameras were not rolling, but the conversation was recorded.

In the recording, Trump boasted about his attempts to seduce a married woman and described kissing and groping women without consent, saying: “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful [women]—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything… Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.” The comments represented Trump bragging about sexual assault as a perk of celebrity status.

The Breaking Story

Fahrenthold received an anonymous tip at approximately 11:00 AM on October 7, 2016. Within hours, he had contacted the Trump campaign, Access Hollywood, and NBC for reaction. By 4:00 PM Eastern Time, the Washington Post published the video and accompanying article. The story immediately became “the most concurrently viewed article in the history of the Post’s website,” with over 100,000 concurrent readers that afternoon. The surge in traffic temporarily crashed the Post’s servers.

Immediate Fallout

Trump issued a video apology later that evening, stating “I said it, I was wrong, I apologize,” while characterizing his comments as “locker room talk.” However, the tape triggered an immediate political crisis for the Republican Party and the Trump campaign, with many Republicans calling for Trump to withdraw from the race.

WikiLeaks Counter-Programming

Remarkably, within one hour of the Washington Post’s publication, WikiLeaks began releasing thousands of emails from Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s Gmail account. The timing—30 minutes after the Access Hollywood tape went public—prompted speculation about coordination to divert media attention from Trump’s scandal. While Podesta himself questioned whether the timing was coincidental, no evidence of direct coordination emerged.

Significance

The Access Hollywood tape represented one of the most explosive political scandals in modern American presidential campaign history. The recording provided direct evidence of Trump describing sexual assault, released at a moment when he was the Republican Party’s nominee for president. Despite predictions that the tape would end Trump’s campaign, he went on to win the election one month later. Fahrenthold’s reporting, including the Access Hollywood story and his investigation of Trump’s charitable giving, earned him the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.

The tape’s release and Trump’s survival of the scandal would fundamentally reshape American political norms around acceptable behavior for presidential candidates and demonstrated the declining power of traditional scandal narratives in the Trump era.