TV host who Donald Trump joked about sexual assault to in video scandal gets new role at Fox News

Former Today Show host Billy Bush has been hired as a contributor at Fox News, returning to cable television a decade after his career collapsed over a leaked 2005 tape during which Donald Trump bantered with him about sexual assault.

Bush made his debut on Jesse Watters Primetime on Tuesday night and will appear across all Fox platforms, the network announced.

“I’m excited to join FOX News Media and its loyal audience to share my perspective on the people, ideas and moments shaping today’s culture,” Bush said in a statement released through Fox News Media, “as well as the ones trying to undo it!”

The move comes ten years after Bush lost his position as an anchor on NBC’s Today Show following the release of a three-minute video recording. In the clip, captured on the set of Days of Our Lives while Bush was an anchor for Access Hollywood, Donald Trump made crude remarks about women and bragged about groping them. Bush was heard laughing at the comments.

“You can do anything,” Trump said on the tape, which was published by The Washington Post shortly before the 2016 presidential election.

Following the disclosure, Bush issued a statement saying he was “embarrassed and ashamed” of his conduct.

“Of course he said it,” Bush wrote in a 2017 essay in The New York Times, addressing later reports that Trump had questioned the authenticity of the recording. “And we laughed along, without a single doubt that this was hypothetical hot air from America’s highest-rated bloviator.”

In the same piece, Bush directed comments toward women who had made allegations of sexual misconduct against Trump.

“To these women: I will never know the fear you felt or the frustration of being summarily dismissed and called a liar,” Bush wrote, “but I do know a lot about the anguish of being inexorably linked to Donald Trump.”

More than a dozen women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct. In 2023, a federal jury in New York found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll over a mid-1990s incident in a Manhattan department store dressing room, awarding her nearly $90 million in damages. Trump is appealing the verdict.

Bush, 54, who is a nephew of former President George H.W. Bush and a cousin of former President George W. Bush, went on to host the syndicated program Extra for five years and launched the podcast “Hot Mics With Billy Bush.”