Melania Trump has insisted that her husband is a "gentleman" and that the women who allege that he sexually assaulted them are lying.
She also said that lewd comments Donald Trump made about women that were caught on videotape were unacceptable but did not represent the man she knows.
The Republican presidential nominee was guilty of "boy talk" but was "egged on" by TV host Billy Bush, she added.
The tape prompted dozens of Republicans to drop their support for him.
In the video, Mr Trump tells Mr Bush, who was then host of NBC's Access Hollywood, that he can force himself on women because he's a star.
Several women have since come forward and accused Mr Trump of sexual assault, which he denies.
"I know he respects women but he is defending himself because they are lies," Mrs Trump said in an interview with CNN.
"I believe my husband," she said. "My husband is kind and he is a gentleman and he would never do that."
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Media captionMichelle Obama and Donald Trump's duelling speeches on women
She claimed the scandal had been "organised and put together to hurt his candidacy" by Hillary Clinton's campaign team and the media.
"With the details [the media] have got, did they ever check the backgrounds of these women? They didn't have any facts," she added.
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Speaking for the first since the scandal began, Mrs Trump defended her husband's conduct with women, saying he had never behaved inappropriately over the years.
Women commonly approached her husband in front of her to give him their phone numbers and behave inappropriately, she said.
Media captionUS Election 2016: Trump fans discuss 'election rigging'
Reflecting on the 2005 Access Hollywood videotape leaked to the media 10 days ago, she said: "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."
After the taped remarks became public, Mrs Trump issued a statement saying she found the words he spoke to be offensive but she accepted his apology.
Now she believes Billy Bush, who was fired by NBC over the tape, was the main culprit.
Mr Trump, she said, "was led on - like, egged on - from the host to say dirty and bad stuff".
She also justified her husband's tactic of appearing with the women who have accused former President Bill Clinton of sexual assault.
With three weeks to go before Americans cast their vote, polls show Mr Trump with considerable ground to make up on Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in key battleground states.
Both Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin frequently claim to reject outdated Cold War thinking, but it’s hard to avoid the comparison when both leaders devoted their addresses to the U.N. General Assembly on Monday morning to rejecting the other’s worldview.
Speaking shortly after Obama dismissed Russia’s view that Syria’s Bashar al-Assad can be a partner in fighting ISIS, Putin, making his first address to the General Assembly in a decade, blamed foreign—read: U.S.—interference for helping the spread of extremism in the Middle East. “Rather than bringing about reforms, an aggressive foreign interference has resulted in the brazen destruction of institutions,” he said. Addressing “those who’ve caused the situation,” Putin said he’s temped to ask, “do you realize now what you’ve done?” (Putin never referred to the U.S. specifically, only to an unnamedVoldemort-like malevolent presence doing terrible things in the world.)
Attacking the policies of two U.S. presidents in one fell swoop, Putin noted that the ranks of ISIS include former Iraqi service members who were decommissioned after the 2003 invasion, as well as the “ranks of so-called moderate opposition. First they are armed and trained, and then they defect to the Islamic State.”
Saying “we cannot allow these criminals who have already tasted blood to return home and continue their evil doings,” Putin argued that ISIS’s growth poses a threat to all nations, including Russia, and called for the formation of an international partnership “similar to the anti-Hitler coalition” in order to fight them. (That would be a coalition with several brutal dictators competing for the role of Stalin.)
This wasn’t the only historical analogy in Putin’s remarks. He also compared western attempts to spread democracy in the Middle East to Soviet-era experiments in spreading Communism around the globe, suggesting they were destined for similar failure. “No one has to conform to a single development model that someone has recognized as the only right one,” he said.
Moments after Obama rejected the notion of a “conspiracy of U.S.-controlled NGOs” to overthrow governments around the world, Putin described the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s government as a “military coup” that was “orchestrated from outside.”
Putin also defended Russia’s use of its veto at the U.N. Security Council, which U.S. officials say undermines the authority of the body by shielding violators of international law from criticism and sanctions. Russia’s response is that the U.S. is simply irritated by a check on its unrestrained power in international affairs. Putin rejected criticism of Russia’s veto as “a dangerous attempt to “undermine the legitimacy of the United Nations” by a power who “thought they knew better and didn’t have to reckon with the UN.”
Wonder who he could be talking about.
