October 8, 2016

Melania Trump Breaks Silence About Her Husband’s Sexual Assault Boast

“Unacceptable and offensive.”

David Goldman/AP

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Melania Trump issued a statement Saturday afternoon calling her husband’s boastful comments about groping women “offensive” and “unacceptable”—though she didn’t condemn the specific behavior that Donald Trump had bragged about.

“The words my husband used are unacceptable and offensive to me,” read the statement, which was released by the campaign. “This does not represent the man that I know. He has the heart and mind of a leader. I hope people will accept his apology, as I have, and focus on the important issues facing our nation and the world.”

Her reaction comes just under 24 hours after the Washington Post published previously unaired footage from 2005 of Donald Trump and TV host Billy Bush discussing how the GOP nominee hit on a married woman and how Trump believed he could “do anything” to women.

Melania Trump’s statement comes amid a deluge of criticism from Republican leaders, many of whom have begun to withdraw their endorsements for the nominee and call for him to drop out of the race. You can see the growing list of dissenters here.

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We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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