Shock jock Howard Stern on Monday refuted his friend Donald Trump’s claim that his leaked comments about grabbing women’s genitals were just “locker room talk.”
“I have never been in the room when someone has said, ‘Grab them by the pussy,” Stern said on his Sirius satellite radio show, quoting Trump’s own words caught on a hot mic during a 2005 “Access Hollywood” appearance. “No one’s ever advocated going that step where you get a little bit, ‘Hey I’m going to invade someone’s space.'”
Though Stern built his own career on jokes about mass shootings and raunchy interviews grilling celebrities about their sex lives, he said there was a line between lewdly describing women’s bodies and boasting about sexual assault.
Other Trump allies, including his wife Melania, have argued that his words do not describe assault and are just “boys talk.”
Stern has avoided discussing his frequent interviews with the real estate mogul, though their conversations about the invasion of Iraq and Ivanka Trump’s appearance have cropped up repeatedly during the campaign. While Stern said he saw replaying their interviews as a “betrayal,” he told his audience he asked the Republican nominee why he was running for president knowing what he has said on the record.
Stern said he intentionally brought Trump on air often knowing that he would make “entertaining” and inappropriate comments about women.
“I fully knew what I was doing when I interviewed Trump. I knew I had a guy who loved to talk about sex,” Stern said. “I had a guy who loved to evaluate women on a scale of 1 to 10. These are avenues I went down because I knew it would entertain the audience.”
