‘It was not me’: Donald Trump denies being own publicist in surreal audio recording from 1991
Donald Trump bristled during a Friday interview when he was asked about a recently unearthed audio recording of him allegedly discussing his own love life in third-person.
“It was not me on the phone. It was not me on the phone,” the presumptive Republican presidential nominee said on the “Today” show, dismissing the line of questioning as “low” and unimportant.
Earlier Friday, the Washington Post published a surreal, 14-minute phone call from 1991 between a man who said his name was John Miller — and who sounds like Trump — discussing Trump’s dating life.
“He gets called by everybody in the book in terms of women,” the man says in the recording, which was with Sue Carswell, a reporter at People magazine.
“Actresses, people that you write about, just call to see if they can go out with him,” he soon adds.
Trump, a real estate scion, was frequently covered by New York’s tabloids in the 1980s and 1990s, years before he burst on to the national scene as the star of “The Apprentice.”
He is widely described as having used two alter egos — “John Miller” and “John Barron” — in order to be his own publicist. At the time, Carswell reported that both New York Post columnist Cindy Adams and Marla Maples, Trump’s second wife who is discussed in the phone call, identified the voice in the recording as Trump’s.
“Astoundingly, and sadly, the most telling response came from Marla Maples herself,” Carswell wrote for People in 1991. “After she listened to a fragment and identified Trump, she was flabbergasted. It was the first time she had heard him publicly declare the relationship over.”
But on Friday morning, Trump said the recording was a “scam.”
“I don’t know anything about it,” he said on “Today.”
“You’re telling me about it for the first time,” the mogul continued. “And it doesn’t sound like my voice at all. I have many, many people that are trying to imitate my voice. And you can imagine that. And this sounds like one of the scams.”
Anchor Savannah Guthrie continued to press Trump on the topic.
“The Post says that you acknowledged a couple decades ago that in fact that was you. But it was a joke,” she told him.
“I don’t think it was me. It doesn’t sound like me. I don’t know even what they’re talking about,” Trump replied.
Trump, asked about the recording a couple more times, criticized the questions and asked to move on to other topics.
“Wow. You mean you’re going so low as to talk about something that took place 25 years ago about whether or not I made a phone call?” he pushed ‘’back. “Let’s get on to more current subjects,” he added.
