(CNN) Melania Trump defended Donald Trump in her first interview since the Republican nominee faced allegations of sexual misconduct, calling those accusations "lies" and saying Trump was "egged on" into "boy talk" during a 2005 tape in which he made lewd comments about women. 
 
 "I believe my husband. I believe my husband," she said in an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper on Monday. 
 
 "This was all organized from the opposition. And with the details ... did they ever check the background of these women? They don't have any facts." 
 
 She also said she hadn't heard her husband use that kind of language before. 
 
 "No. No, that's why I was surprised, because I said like I don't know that person that would talk that way, and that he would say that kind of stuff in private," Melania Trump said. 
 
 "I heard many different stuff -- boys talk," she said. "The boys, the way they talk when they grow up and they want to sometimes show each other, 'Oh, this and that' and talking about the girls. But yes, I was surprised, of course." 
 
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 She specifically attacked a first-person account in People Magazine, in which journalist Natasha Stoynoff said Trump made an unwanted advance while she worked on a story about his one-year wedding anniversary. 
 
 The reporter described a chance encounter later with Melania Trump, who says it never happened -- and her lawyers have threatened to sue over the claim. 
 
 "Even the story that came out in people magazine, the writer she said my husband took her to the room and start kissing her," she said. "She wrote in the same story about me -- that she saw me on 5th Avenue, and I said to her, 'Natasha, how come we don't see you anymore?' I was never friends with her, I would not recognize her." 
 
 That, Melania Trump said, "was another thing like people come out saying lies and not true stuff." 
 
 'Egged on' 
 
 It was the first public defense Melania Trump has made of her husband since a tape in which Trump bragged about sexually aggressive behavior toward women was published by The Washington Post and NBC. In the wake of that report, several women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct. 
 
 Trump said her husband was "egged on" in the 2005 tape in which he made lewd comments about his own sexually aggressive behavior toward women -- remarks she says were "boy talk." 
 
 "I said to my husband that, you know, the language was inappropriate. It's not acceptable. And I was surprised, because that is not the man that I know," she said. 
 
 "And as you can see from the tape, the cameras were not on -- it was only a mic. And I wonder if they even knew that the mic was on," she said, referring to Trump and NBC's "Access Hollywood" host Billy Bush. 
 
 She said they were engaged in "boy talk, and he was led on -- like, egged on -- from the host to say dirty and bad stuff." 
 
 She said she agrees with Michelle Obama's assertion that kissing or groping a woman without consent is sexual assault. 
 
 "But every assault should be taken care of in a court of law. And to accuse, no matter who it is, a man or a woman, without evidence is damaging and unfair," she said. 
 
 Melania Trump defended her husband's criticism on the campaign trail of his accusers' looks -- an implication that the women who have alleged his misconduct aren't attractive enough to sexually assault. 
 
 'I know he respects women' 
 
 "He's raw. He will say it as he feels it. So you know, I know he respects women. But he's defending himself because they're lies," she said. 
 
 She said she jokes that her husband at times behaves like an overgrown boy -- and that she saw his "Access Hollywood" remarks as emblematic of that. 
 
 "Sometimes I say I have two boys at home -- I have my young son and I have my husband. But I know how some men talk, and that's how I saw it, yes," she said. 
 
 She said she would keep their personal conversations private -- but that Trump apologized for his remarks on the tape. 
 
 "I accept his apology. I hope the American people will accept it as well. And it was many, many years ago. He's not the man that I know," she said. 
 
 Melania Trump called her husband "real" and "raw" -- and said because of his years as an entertainer, he faced an especially tough challenge transitioning into politics, because he has made decades' worth of controversial comments. 
 
 "It's very hard, especially for him -- when he decided to run for the presidency, because he did so many stuff in his life. He was on so many tapes, so many shows. And we knew that -- that, you know, tapes will come out, people won't want to go against him. 
 
 "But my husband is real. He's raw. He tells it like it is. He's kind. He's a gentleman. He supports everybody. He supports women. He encourages them to go to the highest level, to achieve their dreams. He employs many, many women," she said. 
 
 'He didn't say he did it' 
 
 She said she wouldn't describe what Trump said on the tape as sexual assault, even though in the video Trump appeared to be describing his own actions. 
 
 "No, that's not sexual assault," she said. "He didn't say he did it." 
 
 Melania Trump said she believes Trump in part because she's seen him deflect brazen advances from other women. 
 
 "I see many, many women coming to him and giving phone numbers and, you know, want(ing) to work for him -- inappropriate stuff from women. And they know he's married," she said. 
 
 "You've seen that?" Cooper asked. 
 
 "Oh yes, of course. It was in front of me," Trump said. "In front of me. And I've said, like, 'Why did you give your number to my husband?' " 
 
 Melania Trump reserved her strongest critique for the political press, which she says has yet to report an accurate story about her. 
 
 "I didn't expect media would be so dishonest and so mean. I didn't expect that," she said. "Also for me, from the beginning, I never had one correct story -- one honest story." 
 
 She backed her husband's claims that the election is being rigged in Hillary Clinton's favor, arguing that media bias is undercutting her husband. 
 
 "Well I see it how the media is portraying -- I see how they report things, and what they want to say and what they don't want to say," she said. 
 
 "They're going -- just for example, he makes a speech 45 minutes long, they take a sentence out, and they're going on and on about that sentence, nothing else," she said. "And he talks about the issues, and that's what American people want to hear, it's about issues, about jobs, about the future of our country, and that's what he wants to do. 
 
 She added: "He wants to secure the borders, he wants to secure America, he wants to bring jobs back, he wants to bring economy back, and he's very passionate about American people, because he knows he can do that. He's a worker, he's a fighter, he is, he's very passionate about it, and he will not give up, he will fight till the end, and he will fight for American people as he's fighting now for himself." 
 
 Melania Trump also made clear she doesn't want sympathy. 
 
 "I'm very strong. And people -- they don't really know me. People think and talk about me like, 'Oh, Melania, oh poor Melania,'" she said. 
 
 "Don't feel sorry for me. Don't feel sorry for me. I can handle everything," she added. ||||| Melania Trump, wife of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, spoke out for the first time Monday since a videotape was released of her husband making lewd comments about women in 2005, saying, "we are moving on." 
 
 Trump made the comments to Fox News' Ainsley Earhardt in an interview Tuesday morning on "Fox & Friends." 
 
 “Those words, they were offensive to me and they were inappropriate,” Trump told Fox News. “And he apologized to me. And I expect -- I accept his apology. And we are moving on.” 
 
 Trump added that she believes the mainstream media wants to damage her and her family by “saying lies about me, lies about my family.” 
 
 She said in the interview that the comments that were made on the tape were not made by the person she knows and that any other allegation of Donald Trump’s sexual misconduct should be handled in court. 
 
 Trump was then asked what she would tell women who were deterred because of the lewd tapes. 
 
 “My husband is kind and he’s a gentleman. He cares about people. He cares about women.” 
 
 She also said that it's fair for the media and her husband to bring up former President Bill Clinton's infidelities amid his wife's presidential campaign. 
 
 “They're asking for it. They started,” Trump said, referring to nude images from the 1990s published by the New York Post earlier this year. “They started from the beginning of the campaign putting my picture from modeling days." 
 
 "That was my modeling days and I'm proud what I did. I worked very hard,” she added. 
 
 Melania Trump's image later was used in a negative ad campaign during the Republican primary. 
 
 At the time of its release, Donald Trump accused former rival Ted Cruz of being involved and responded by tweeting an unflattering image of the Texas senator's wife. Cruz denied involvement in the release of the photos. 
 
 As for any debate advice for her husband, Trump said that he should “be himself and talk about the issues.” ||||| When Melania Trump stood by her man-child the other night on CNN over the lewd comments to Billy Bush on a hot mic, she told Anderson Cooper that her husband “was led on — like, egged on — from the host to say dirty and bad stuff.’’ 
 
 She was offering her best defense. But it was actually the best damnation. 
 
 At the final debate tonight in Las Vegas, Donald Trump once more showed how easily egged on he is. 
 
 Continuing to deploy lethal darts from her team of shrinks, Hillary Clinton baited Trump into a series of damaging nails-in-the-coffin statements. And it was so easy. The one-time litigator prosecuted the case against Trump, sparking another temperamental spiral, as effectively as Chris Christie once broke down Marco Rubio. 
 
 In Trump’s warped fun-house mirror of a psyche, every rejection is a small death. That is why he harps on humiliation, that America is being humiliated on the world stage, that we are losing potency — a theme that resonates with angry voters who feel humiliated by their dwindling economic fortunes and angry about illegal immigrants and refugees swarming in who might be competition. 
 
 She once more proved adept at getting her rival’s goat: She again contended that he’s not a self-made man but a spoiled rich kid who was underwritten by his father and she accused him of choking on bringing up the issue of who would pay for the wall when he met with the president of Mexico. 
 
 Trump tried to stay calm, but he can never let go of a slight. 
 
 He defended himself on groping charges by saying, “Nobody has more respect for women than I do.’’ But he ended up, after Clinton’s hazing — “Donald thinks belittling women makes him bigger” — blurting out as she talked about entitlements: “Such a nasty woman.’’ 
 
 No doubt it is hard for a man — whose lovely, sphinx-like wife rarely talks at dinners with friends to make room for more talking by Trump — to listen to an opinionated woman speak dismissively to him over 90 minutes. 
 
 When Clinton called Trump a Putin puppet, he unraveled, once more proving how malleable he is with anyone from Vladimir Putin to Clinton, who either praises him or pokes him. 
 
 “No puppet. No puppet. You’re the puppet,’’ he said, going into what the former Obama chief speechwriter Jon Favreau tweeted was “a full Baldwin.’’ Talking about Putin, Trump once more offered the simple reason he has flipped his party’s wary stance toward the Evil Empire, subjugating his party’s ideology to his own ego: “He said nice things about me.’’ Similarly, he reduced a debate about the Supreme Court to the fact that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had attacked him and had to apologize. 
 
 He was so unnerved, he said one of the most shocking things ever heard in a debate, putting his ego ahead of American democracy. Asked by the admirable debate moderator, Fox News’ Chris Wallace, if he would accept the results of the election or reject it as rigged, Trump replied coyly and self-destructively: “I will tell you at the time,’’ adding, “I will keep you in suspense.” 
 
 The inanity continued, naturally, when Trump spinners talked to the press after the debate. 
 
 As The Washington Post’s Robert Costa tweeted, Sarah Palin told reporters that Trump will accept only a “legitimate” election, and anything else would betray those who “died” for freedom. 
 
 And the Post’s Phil Rucker tweeted that “Giuliani just predicted Dems will ‘steal’ the election in Pennsylvania by busing in people from out of state to pose as dead people to cast ballots.’’ 
 
 Trump tried to give what one of his biographers, Timothy O’Brien, calls his “Clint Eastwood ‘High Plains Drifter’ glare’’ and spaghetti Western talk. “We have some bad hombres here and we’re gonna get ’em out,’’ he said about illegal immigrants who commit crimes. 
 
 But he was all hat, no cattle. He gets so easily distracted by belittling statements — even though he dishes them out so easily — that he could not focus to make points in areas where Hillary is vulnerable. 
 
 In order to stop losing, he would have to stop losing it. 
 
 But he didn’t. He got egged on. Bigly.
– Melania Trump has kept a low profile since the GOP convention, but she's suddenly taking a more aggressive role on behalf of her husband. In interviews with CNN and Fox News, the wife of Donald Trump said she has accepted his apology over the language he used in his recent hot mic scandal, suggested he was egged on by host Billy Bush, and characterized it as "boys' talk." As for the women accusing her husband of sexual abuse, "they don't have any facts." Some excerpts: "I said to my husband that, you know, the language was inappropriate. It's not acceptable. And I was surprised, because that is not the man that I know." (To Anderson Cooper of CNN.) "Those words, they were offensive to me and they were inappropriate. And he apologized to me. ... I accept his apology. And we are moving on." (To Ainsley Earhardt of Fox.) Her husband "was led on—like, egged on—from the host to say dirty and bad stuff." (CNN) She said she'd never heard her husband talk like that. "No, that's why I was surprised, because I said like I don't know that person that would talk that way, and that he would say that kind of stuff in private." (CNN) It's "boys' talk," she said. "The boys, the way they talk when they grow up and they want to sometimes show each other, 'Oh, this and that' and talking about the girls. But yes, I was surprised, of course." (CNN) On the tactic of dredging up Bill Clinton's past: “They're asking for it. They started,” she said. "They started from the beginning of the campaign putting my picture from modeling days." (To Fox News.) Nude images of Melania Trump appeared in the New York Post, and another surfaced in an ad by a super PAC backing Ted Cruz. (Billy Bush has been fired by NBC.)