The Republican nominee for president of the United States got up early this morning to actively encourage every American to watch the nonexistent “sex tape” of a Venezuelan celebrity and Hillary Clinton supporter.
Early Friday morning, Donald Trump went on a slut-shaming Twitter tirade against Alicia Machado, the former Miss Universe whom Trump has repeatedly attacked (for her weight, among other things) and whom Clinton has embraced as part of her presidential campaign. (On Thursday, Trump adviser Newt Gingrich also slammed the whole Machado controversy as “the new Benghazi lie.”)
“Wow, Crooked Hillary was duped and used by my worst Miss [Universe]. Hillary floated her as an ‘angel’ without checking her past, which is terrible!” Trump began on his personal Twitter account.
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“Using Alicia [Machado] in the debate as a paragon of virtue just shows that Crooked Hillary suffers from BAD JUDGEMENT! Hillary was set up by a con,” he continued, before finally unleashing his climactic attempt at an own.
“Did Crooked Hillary help disgusting (check out sex tape and past) Alicia M become a U.S. citizen so she could use her in the debate?” he tweeted.
(Trump’s rant prompted a retaliatory Twitterstorm from Clinton’s account, which stated that “Alicia deserves praise for courageously standing up to Trump’s attacks,” thus continuing this latest proxy war. Machado herself responded on Friday, writing online about Trump's "campaign of hate" and his insistence on "discrediting and demoralizing a woman.")
This is hardly Trump's first middle-of-the-night Twitter tirade—though this one is particularly unhinged. Oh, and that “sex tape” Trump urged his followers to “check out”? It doesn’t actually exist.
He is likely referring to risqué but decidedly non-explicit footage from La Granja, a Spanish-language reality-TV show similar to MTV’s Real World, during which the former beauty queen supposedly had sex with a fellow cast member. (As hoax-debunking website Snopes noted, it’s hard to know for sure what kind of sexual activity actually took place; reality-TV is a notoriously staged, fabrication-heavy enterprise—as Trump himself should know.)
Machado, at the time, played up the sex-on-reality-TV story in a round of tabloid publicity, and the mini-scandal reportedly led to her boyfriend, baseball player Bobby Abreu, breaking things off.
But has Machado ever had a “disgusting” leaked “sex tape,” as Trump stated, or has she ever filmed hardcore porn, as many Trump allies and her conservative critics have alleged this week?
No, there is zero evidence for that, as The Daily Beast previously reported.
And if we are going to talk about public figures behaving badly on reality-TV shows in the past, then we might as well start with the GOP presidential nominee himself, who once talked to a woman on The Apprentice, his NBC reality series, about “dropping to [her] knees” and how that “must be a pretty picture.”
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on their candidate’s latest claim.
Furthermore, this isn't even Trump's first foray into sex-tape pronouncements. In a 2003 interview with Howard Stern, Trump admitted to watching Paris Hilton's famous sex tape—despite knowing her since the age of 12 and being close friends with the Hilton family.
