As the sexual misconduct allegations dog Donald Trump’s presidential bid, his wife Melania sought to come to his rescue on Monday, rejecting the accounts of women accusers as “lies” and explaining away his controversial lewd comments in a 2005 tape as “boy talk” he was goaded into.
“I believe my husband. I believe my husband,” Melania Trump told CNN in what was her first interview since the tape surfaced on October 7 and was quickly followed by the swirl of allegations with as many as nine women claiming that he groped or kissed them against their will over the years.
Asserting that all this was “organized from the opposition”, Melania Trump insisted: “My husband is kind and he is a gentleman and he would never do that.” She also attacked the media for going to town with their claims without any effort to “check the background of these women”.
Her strong defence of her husband came even as Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton widened her lead further in a slew of polls. On the eve of the third and final presidential debate, Clinton led Trump by 6.9 per cent in the Real Clear Politics average of 11 recent polls. In the latest of them from CBS News, she led by nine percentage points (47-38).
Clinton, however, is up against embarrassing revelations from Wikileaks, which has been releasing on a daily basis thousands of emails hacked from the account of her campaign chief John Podesta -- a subject that is set to come up prominently in Wednesday night’s debate in las Vegas.
Melania Trump agreed with First lady Michelle Obama’s recent comment that kissing or groping a woman without consent is sexual assault, but argued: “Every assault should be taken care of in a court of law. And to accuse, no matter who it is, a man or a woman, without evidence is damaging and unfair.”
Questioned on the tape in which Trump is heard making the lewd comments and boasted about groping and kissing women, she conceded the talk was “inappropriate” and “not acceptable”, but went on to say her husband was “egged on” by TV host Billy Bush to “say dirty and bad stuff”.
Saying she has never heard Trump use that kind of language before, she said: “I said to my husband that, you know, the language was inappropriate. It’s not acceptable. And I was surprised, because that is not the man that I know.”
At the same time, she called him “raw” and a person who “will say it as he feels it”. Joking that her husband at times behaves like an overgrown boy, she commented: “Sometimes I say I have two boys at home -- I have my young son and I have my husband. But I know how some men talk, and that’s how I saw it, yes.”
Echoing Trump’s complaint that he was the victim of a broad conspiracy between the liberal mainstream media and the Clinton campaign, she said: “It was all organized from the opposition… They can never check the background of these women. They don’t have any facts.”
Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, continued with her preparation for the debate even as Wikileaks came up with a damaging revelation that a top State Department official “pressured” the FBI to downgrade the classification of Clinton’s mails as part of a “quid pro quo”.