Billy Bush tried to stay busy after he was fired from the Today show in 2016.
“My brother is my best friend … [and] he was there for me. I would never have survived without him,” Bush, 53, said on the Thursday, July 10, episode of the “Literally! With Rob Lowe” podcast. “Then my pastor [was there]. S***, I walked on rocks with Tony Robbins, like, I did everything I could think of to keep myself from jumping off the building.”
He added, “I was about to get a huge paycheck. My first really big paycheck. I’m at the Today show. They still have money. They’re the last thing in linear television with real money on the news side, and I was like, ‘Well, wait, wait.’ And then right back to the bottom of the hill, or let’s say [middle] of the hill, and then you have to keep coming back up again.”
Bush was suspended by NBC in 2016 after audio resurfaced of a lewd conversation between him and now-President Donald Trump while they were riding on an Access Hollywood bus in 2005. Bush was heard laughing and engaging with Trump, now 79, who overtly bragged about flirting with married women and nonconsensually touching them.
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“Obviously, I’m embarrassed and ashamed,” Bush told Us Weekly in a statement immediately after the tape resurfaced. “It’s no excuse, but this happened 11 years ago — I was younger, less mature and acted foolishly in playing along. I’m very sorry.”
Bush, who had signed a three-year contract with NBC, was formally let go in October 2016.
In the wake of the scandal, Bush found that many of his celebrity friends had seemingly vanished.
“The people who weren’t there — and the silence,” he recalled to podcast host Rob Lowe. “A lot of them you forgive because sometimes you don’t know whether someone has cancer or something … [or if] they’re going through something. Like, do they want to hear from me? I don’t even know how to say this. I feel bad.”
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Bush, however, said it meant a lot whenever someone reached out to share support.
“I remember every person [who] did that. It’s like, ‘Thank you,’” he added, specifically mentioning Julie Bowen, Cindy Crawford, the late Suzanne Somers, Dennis Quaid and Eric Stonestreet. “The list goes [on]. Many. I have them all somewhere.”
Despite a flurry of support, Bush still carried a “terrible [amount of] shame” about the scandal.
“It’s, like, going to be this albatross that holds me down,” Bush said. “Let’s be totally frank. Did I ever get back to network television and a large check? No, I kept waiting for it [and] I kept hoping. I made it back to Extra, revived [by the network] three years after the incident, and I ran that for five years.”
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