Access Hollywood tape

The Access Hollywood tape was a 2005 recording whose release in October 2016 turned Donald Trump’s remarks about women into a public test of his denials. For Megan Twohey, it seemed to echo behavior she had been investigating for months; for the reporting that followed, it supplied context, not proof of any particular allegation.

Recording and Release

On Friday, October 7, 2016, Megan Twohey was speaking with a source when colleagues began leaving their desks and gathering around televisions in The New York Times newsroom. The Washington Post had obtained a snippet of the recording, originally made for the entertainment program Access Hollywood. In it, Trump spoke about initiating physical contact with women and invoked the latitude he believed celebrity gave him. The remarks were unusually explicit for a presidential candidate speaking in a publicly circulated recording.

The tape’s force lay partly in the difference between a private boast, captured years earlier, and its sudden public availability during a presidential campaign. Twohey had already spent months reporting on Trump’s treatment of women. Hearing the recording, she understood it as apparent confirmation of a pattern she had been trying to document. That was a reporter’s assessment of its significance, not independent verification of every incident women might describe.

Response and Reporting

Trump apologized for the remarks, then characterized them as locker-room talk. At a presidential debate two days later, he denied having acted in the ways he had boasted about. The contrast between the recording and his denial made the question of whether the words corresponded to women’s experiences an immediate reporting matter.

Within a week, Twohey and her colleague had an article nearly ready featuring two women who said Trump’s conduct matched what he had described. Jessica Leeds and Rachel Crooks had both contacted The New York Times by email to set out their allegations. Leeds, then seventy-four, recalled an encounter during a business trip in the early 1980s. Crooks, then thirty-three and a doctoral candidate, described an encounter from the winter when she was twenty-two. Their accounts concerned different circumstances, but, as the reporters assessed them, each bore a broad resemblance to conduct described on the tape.

Both women were willing to speak on the record, though neither sought attention for its own sake. They wanted the public to know that, in their view, Trump was lying when he denied the conduct. Their willingness to be identified did not remove the need for verification. Twohey and her colleague checked with people the women had previously told, examined their backgrounds for possible political ties, and sought confirmation that Crooks had worked at Trump Tower, including by asking for an old photograph of her at her desk. The checks were intended to protect the women and the newspaper, even though such scrutiny could feel insulting to sources who had already agreed to speak publicly.

What the Tape Could and Could Not Establish

The recording offered unusually direct evidence of Trump’s own words. It did not, by itself, establish that he had carried out the conduct he described, or prove the details of Leeds’s or Crooks’s accounts. That distinction shaped the reporting: the tape sharpened the stakes and supplied a point of comparison, while the women’s accounts required their own corroboration and careful presentation. Trump’s apology and subsequent denial further put the relationship between boast, conduct, and accountability at the center of the story.

The episode also marked a change in the conditions under which Twohey was reporting. Earlier public attacks had been unlike anything she had experienced, and her scheduled wedding had taken her away from the newsroom in June 2016. After returning from her honeymoon, she continued investigating Trump. By the time the tape appeared, her questions about women’s allegations were not abstract: the recording gave the reporting a new public reference point, while the women’s willingness to go on the record made it possible to examine whether that reference point matched reported experience.

Afterlife in the Book’s Timeline

The recording remained a marker in the chronology beyond the initial reporting. On October 5, 2017, the Senate advanced Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination, one day before the likely final vote. That date was the first anniversary of Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s first Weinstein story and fell almost exactly two years after the release of the Access Hollywood tape. The book places those dates together, linking distinct events in a wider period of public dispute over allegations, denials, and women’s accounts.

In that chronology, the tape is both a specific media object and a recurring point of reference: a fragment recorded in 2005, disclosed during the 2016 campaign, and remembered alongside later reporting and political conflict. Its importance rests not on resolving every allegation, but on making Trump’s own recorded words impossible to separate from the claims and denials that followed.