Arnold Schwarzenegger owns groping claims, offers apology

Arnold Schwarzenegger was dogged by groping allegations by at least 15 women.

Now, the actor has admitted his previous mistakes and apologised to them.

“My reaction in the beginning, I was kind of… defensive,” he said in Netflix docuseries Arnold.

“Today, I can look at it and kind of say, it doesn’t really matter what time it is. If it’s the Muscle Beach days of 40 years ago, or today, that this was wrong. It was bullshit. Forget all the excuses, it was wrong.”

The Terminator star faced allegations of groping by six women during his 2003 California governor election, which he won.

At the time, the actor-turned-politician dismissed the accusations as “made-up” but admitted “behaving badly” sometimes on the sets.

The accounts of the aggrieved women were published in the Los Angeles Times.

“Personally, I was surprised that it didn’t have more of an effect on the election. I thought that more people would be offended themselves,” Los Angeles Times reporter Carla Hall on Schwazenegar's win with 1 million votes despite the explosive report.

“When Schwarzenegger announced he was running for governor, the staff of the LA Times immediately went into high gear to start looking into stories that we had heard for years, but no one had actually investigated them fully,” adding, “We had barely six weeks to work on this, and we started talking to women.”