Billy Bush says he reported the Access Hollywood tape to producer back in 2005

Bush wasn't trying to get Donald Trump in trouble, he was just reporting to his boss how "funny" it was that Trump tried to sleep with his co-host.

By Mary Kate Carr  |  July 10, 2025 | 9:45am
Photo: Rob Kim/Getty Images
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Billy Bush says he reported the Access Hollywood tape to producer back in 2005
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The Access Hollywood tape (in which Donald Trump infamously uttered the phrase “grab them by the pussy”) had serious career consequences—for Billy Bush. Bush, who can be heard on the tape laughing along to Trump’s lewd remarks, was fired from his job at the Today Show when the recording leaked a decade later, while Trump obviously went on to become President of the United States. (Twice.) If Trump was impervious to that misogynistic tape leaking (and to the multiple assault allegations that came out against him ahead of the 2016 election), there’s probably nothing that could’ve been done to stop his ascent. But, for the record, Billy Bush says he reported Trump’s remarks when they actually happened 20 years ago. 

“The day of the filming in 2005, I called my producer [and] said, ‘You’re not gonna believe what Trump said. He is going after Nancy.’ All I said was ‘Nancy O’Dell’ because I didn’t hear the other stuff,” he claims in a new interview on Rob Lowe’s podcast. Nancy O’Dell was lead anchor of Access Hollywood at the time, and the apparent subject of leering remarks about her body as well as Trump’s other gross declaration on the tape, “I moved on her like a bitch.” (As for whether Bush really “didn’t hear the other stuff,” you can revisit the transcript and decide for yourself how likely that seems.) Bush continued, “I said, ‘He’s trying to take Nancy furniture shopping to sleep with her. This is crazy. He’s done it again! The guy’s an animal!’ I report it, basically, to my superior, but it sits in a desk forever because … had that tape leaked out when it actually occurred in 2005, I would’ve been fired for an entirely different reason: killing their cash cow. Trump was a protected, revered source. He was a hundred million dollars in profit for NBC. He was the king of the ratings.”

Bush gave a similar recap on Tucker Carlson’s podcast earlier this year, recalling how he ended up alone on a hot mic with the then-host of NBC’s The Apprentice. (“The Donald, at that point, while we’re waiting, he gets into his, what he likes to talk about and, you know, you don’t choose the agenda with Donald Trump. He talks at you.”) Bush felt he handled Trump’s remarks about O’Dell “beautifully,” but reiterates that he had no recollection of the more lewd and misogynistic remarks: “I always remembered it for the personal connection, him talking about taking Nancy O’Dell furniture shopping. I was like, ‘Oh my God, that is so funny, he took Nancy O’Dell furniture shopping because he was trying to hook up with her… this is so absurd.'” 

Bush went on, “I reported it. I didn’t report it like, ‘He said terrible things on the bus, this is awful’… I ran upstairs to my boss like, ‘Oh my God, every time with Trump, it’s something else, the animal. You wouldn’t believe what he did!'” His boss later informed him that he had seen the whole thing because the cameras were still rolling, so Bush told Carlson he advised his boss to “do something” with the tape. “The reason I said that was—nothing that I did, nothing that I was ashamed of, I don’t care. The reason was, in 2005, Donald Trump was the biggest star on NBC… making a hundred million dollars in profit a year for the network.”

Well, thank goodness Bush and the good folks at Access Hollywood were looking out for Trump’s reality show career. The tape ended up leaking later, Bush told Lowe, because NBC, “who hates him, sent out these messages to every division of the company: ‘Do you have any tape?’ What they really wanted was Mark Burnett’s tape, the guy who ran The Apprentice, because you know there’s outtakes forever. But [they asked], ‘Does anyone else have anything of him talking disparagingly about women? We need this’… And my producer at the time was like, ‘Holy shit. The bus ride. That tape, that was like 11 years ago. That’s the time when Bush called me right after it happened.'” The rest is—quite unfortunately for all involved—history.

 
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