"I never said I'm a perfect person," Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said in a taped apology early Saturday concerning the lewd remarks about women he made in 2005 that surfaced in a video Friday.
Trump pledged in the taped apology "to be a better man tomorrow."
The Republican candidate said the years-old comments were nothing more than a "distraction."
Trump, however, also took a swipe during his apology at his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton and her husband. He said former president Bill Clinton had "actually abused women"' and that his wife had bullied her husband's victims.
Republican condemnation
On Friday, Republican Party officials condemned the remarks made by Trump.
The 2005 recording
In the recording, Trump says of women: “You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful... I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.”
"And when you're a star they let you do it," Trump says. "You can do anything."
Trump also talks in graphic terms about making sexual advances toward women.
Trump was speaking privately to a host from the televised entertainment program Access Hollywood, while they were aboard a bus operated by the TV show, accompanied by only a few other people. Trump, who was about to appear on an episode of the TV soap opera Days of Our Lives, was wearing a microphone that was live, recording everything he said.
“No woman should ever be described in these terms or talked about in this manner, ever,'' Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee chair, said in a statement.
Uninvited to Wisconsin
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said he hoped Trump “works to demonstrate to the country that he has greater respect for women than this clip suggests.”
Ryan also said Trump would no longer attend an event Saturday in Ryan’s home state of Wisconsin.
Trump initially said Friday in a statement after the tape surfaced, "This was locker-room banter, a private conversation that took place many years ago. Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course - not even close."
Hillary Clinton,called the statements “horrific” and tweeted: “We cannot allow this man to become president.''
