The release of the Access Hollywood tape in October 2016 transformed Donald Trump’s recorded boasts about his conduct toward women into a test of whether he had acted as he described. For Megan Twohey, the tape seemed to confirm months of reporting; accounts from Jessica Leeds and Rachel Crooks gave that public controversy specific, independently scrutinized allegations. Trump denied their claims and threatened The New York Times with a lawsuit, while the women faced attacks as the story drew attention.

The tape and the reporting

On Friday, October 7, 2016, Twohey was speaking by phone with a source when colleagues across the newsroom began gathering around televisions. The Washington Post had obtained a portion of a 2005 recording from the entertainment program Access Hollywood. In it, Trump described kissing women without waiting for their consent and using his celebrity to claim license to touch them. Twohey understood the recording as more than an embarrassing campaign revelation: its description of behavior resembled allegations she had been piecing together for months.

Trump apologized for the recorded remarks, then characterized them as crude private talk rather than a description of actual conduct. At the October 9 presidential debate, he denied ever kissing women without permission or grabbing intimate parts of their bodies. The gap between the boasts on the recording and his denial sharpened the question the reporting would address: whether women would describe encounters consistent with what he had said.

Within a week, Twohey and a colleague had an article nearly ready, based on accounts from Leeds and Crooks. Both had emailed The New York Times about their allegations, and both told Twohey by phone that they were willing to speak on the record. Neither sought publicity for its own sake; they wanted the public to know they believed Trump was lying.

The women’s accounts

Leeds, then seventy-four, was a former stockbroker and great-grandmother. She said that in the early 1980s, while traveling for work, she received an upgrade to first class on a flight from Dallas to New York City. Trump happened to be seated beside her. About forty-five minutes after takeoff, she alleged, he reached across and groped her. She said she fled to a seat in coach. Her account described an encounter she said had occurred years earlier, not a relationship with Trump or an established acquaintance.

Crooks’s account concerned a brief encounter at Trump Tower. She was twenty-two and working there when she saw Trump waiting for an elevator outside her office. She introduced herself with a businesslike handshake; she said he held on, kissed her cheeks, and then pressed a kiss on her lips. She described feeling angry that he had treated her as insignificant enough to impose himself on her. The episode, as she recounted it, was unwanted and lasted only a minute or two.

The two accounts differed in their circumstances, but Twohey saw a significant correspondence: Crooks described an unwanted kiss, while Leeds described groping, and both allegations resembled the conduct Trump had described on tape. Their accounts also echoed prior allegations by a former Miss Utah and a former business partner in the beauty-pageant industry. That resemblance did not itself establish what had happened; it gave the reporters a reason to investigate and to present each woman’s account, and Trump’s response, for readers to assess.

Verification and Trump’s response

Before publication, Twohey and her colleague checked the women’s accounts with friends and relatives to whom they had confided. They examined the women’s backgrounds for possible connections to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, a concern made especially salient by the approaching election. To verify Crooks’s employment at Trump Tower, Twohey asked her for an old photograph of her at her desk. The scrutiny was demanding, but it was intended to protect both the sources and the newspaper from an account that could not withstand examination.

The final step was to give Trump’s team an opportunity to respond. As evening fell, Twohey sat at her dining table expecting a routine statement from a spokesperson. Instead, Trump called her directly. Before she had asked many questions, he accused Leeds and Crooks of lying, said he did not know them, and challenged why they had not gone to the police. Twohey explained that neither woman claimed to have known him; they described chance encounters. She also reminded him of the other allegations she had raised.

Trump then accused The New York Times of concocting the women’s accounts and threatened to sue if the newspaper published. When the call ended, Twohey felt that he had been given an adequate opportunity to answer the allegations, and the article could proceed with his comments included. The exchange placed the dispute over the women’s accounts alongside a direct challenge to the newspaper’s reporting, rather than allowing his denial to go unrecorded.

Campaign response and consequences

Minutes after the call, Trump appeared at a rally in Florida and directed the crowd’s anger toward journalists, portraying the media as aligned against the public and the reporting as unfair and legally actionable. His response carried the dispute beyond the question of what the tape and the women’s accounts showed: it framed the press itself as an adversary. The timing was politically consequential. Election Day was less than four weeks away; the Republican Speaker of the House said he was sickened by the tape, John McCain withdrew his endorsement, Mike Pence said he was praying for the Trump family, and some Republicans called for Trump to leave the race.

As allegations accumulated, Trump’s denials broadened into attacks on the accusers. He characterized them as liars seeking fame or working for his opponent, disparaged their appearance, and threatened legal action. The backlash was not only rhetorical. A link circulated by Fox Business anchor Lou Dobbs exposed Leeds’s phone number and address and falsely claimed she worked for the Clinton Foundation. Leeds was not easily frightened, but Crooks was badly shaken: reporters gathered outside her Ohio home, and online messages and false claims targeted her. The public controversy thus had a personal cost for the women whose accounts had helped bring it into view.

The reporting also stood against the temptation to treat every allegation as equally verifiable. Twohey declined to cover a separate civil lawsuit whose accuser, identified only as Jane Doe, had not been made available to reporters and could not be independently confirmed. That restraint underscores the distinction at the center of the episode: the tape was public evidence of what Trump had said, while Leeds’s and Crooks’s accounts were allegations the reporters tested, attributed, and paired with his response. The controversy emerged from those elements together, without turning either a recording or a denial into a substitute for reporting.