Here's what's behind the rumors of an affair between Nikki Haley and Trump

• United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley has been embroiled in a controversy over an unsubstantiated rumor she had an affair with President Donald Trump.
• The rumor began when journalist Michael Wolff, who authored an explosive tell-all book about Trump's early White House days, suggested the president was having an affair.
• Readers assumed he was alluding to an affair with Haley, and Haley has denied the rumors and called them "highly offensive" and "disgusting."

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United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley has been the subject of heated debate in recent days over flimsy rumors that she had an affair with President Donald Trump.

The controversy has been escalating for days, but came to a head on Thursday morning on MSNBC's "Morning Joe"  when host Mika Brzezinski threw Michael Wolff, the journalist at the heart of the rumors, off her show in the middle of an interview, claiming that he was "slurring" Haley.

Wolff teased a scandalous passage in his book

Wolff, who wrote the explosive and highly disputed tell-all book "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," told HBO's Bill Maher in mid-January that "there is something in the book that I was absolutely sure of, but it was so incendiary that I just didn't have the ultimate proof."

Wolff then responded affirmatively when Maher asked him if it was "about a woman" and about someone Trump is "f---ing now."

"You just have to read between the lines," Wolff continued. "It's toward the end of the book. You'll know it. ... When you hit that paragraph you're going to say, 'bingo.'"

Viewers and internet sleuths instantly began combing through the final chapters of the book, landing on a passage that read in part, "The president had been spending a notable amount of private time with Haley on Air Force One and was seen to be grooming her for a national political future."

Others, however, pointed to a separate passage mentioning Hope Hicks, the White House communications director who got her start working in communications on Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. The passage read:

The relationship of the president and Hope Hicks, long tolerated as a quaint bond between the older man and a trustworthy young woman, began to be seen as anomalous and alarming. Completely devoted to accommodating him, she, his media facilitator, was the ultimate facilitator of unmediated behavior. His impulses and thoughts - unedited, unreviewed, unchallenged - not only passed through him, but, via Hicks, traveled out into the world without any other White House arbitration.

Haley shot down the 'disgusting' rumor

After roughly a week of rampant speculation, Haley addressed the controversy in an interview with Politico, calling the rumor about her "highly offensive" and "disgusting." She added that she has never been alone with Trump, let alone on Air Force One, and never discussed her political future with him.

"But it goes to a bigger issue that we need to always be conscious of," Haley continued. "At every point in my life, I've noticed that if you speak your mind and you're strong about it and you say what you believe, there is a small percentage of people that resent that and the way they deal with it is to try and throw arrows, lies or not."

Haley then received further backlash after she tweeted criticisms of a Grammys sketch in which Hillary Clinton, along with several celebrities, performed a dramatic reading of Wolff's book.

Haley's tweets drew the ire of some liberals and Trump critics, who needled her for expressing selective outrage against mixing entertainment and politics, when Trump himself frequently blurs lines between the two.

But at this point, many had grown enraged by the perceived hypocrisy among liberal feminists, who have long decried misogynistic rumors and attacks on female Democrats but did not spring en masse to the defense of Haley, a Republican.

Wolff argued that Haley 'embraced' the controversy

Wolff, meanwhile, did little to confirm or deny whether Haley was indeed the subject of the rumor he started. Instead, he told theSkimm he believed Haley had "embraced" the controversy.

"All she does is hammer on this fact," he said. "I mean, if I were being accused of something, and I am not accusing her of anything. She hasn't tried to avoid this, let's say."

Then on "Morning Joe" on Thursday, Brzezinski asked Wolff to explain why he triggered the rumor on Maher's show without providing any evidence.

"I'm gonna go as far as to say that you might be having a fun time playing a little game dancing around this, but you're slurring a woman. It's disgraceful," Brzezinski said.

"She has been accused of nothing," Wolff replied. "She has decided to deny what she has not been accused of."

Brzezinski fired back: "Are you kidding? You're on the set of 'Morning Joe,' we don't BS here … I'm sorry, this is awkward - you're here on the set with us, but we're done."

The show then abruptly cut to a commercial break.

Eliza Relman contributed reporting.