Donald Trump called Lucy Lawless to tell her he'd 'just come on the market'

Lucy Lawless has confirmed Donald Trump called her room and asked her out while she was staying at a Trump-owned hotel in New York.

The Kiwi actress confirmed to NZME today that she was engaged when the presidential candidate propositioned her in 1997 and she said he immediately backed off when she told him.

Lawless, who was widely known as the star of hit TV show Xena: Warrior Princess, told the NZ Herald in 1997 that Trump had dialled the direct line to her room.

"I was staying in his hotel and the phone rang, and I thought that was a bit peculiar," Lawless, who was 29 at the time, said. He then went on to ask her out.

"The thing that was funny about it, is that he said he had recently - and you could hear the inverted commas - 'just come on the market'.

"He said, 'Perhaps you heard, I've recently come on the market'. My eyebrows shot up. It was a funny term for a property developer to use."

Lawless said she was not a fan of Trump "on any level" so it wasn't hard to say no to him.

"He asked, 'Are you seeing somebody?' and I said 'yes,' and he immediately backed off," Lawless said at the time, adding that he took it "like a gentleman".

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The former Xena star remains 'anti-Trump' and has shared several tweets about him on Twitter.

Lawless was engaged to Robert Tapert at the time, and the pair remain married.

The latest report comes as Trump's campaign team threatens to sue The New York Times after the paper published a story about two women who claimed he groped them.

The Times signalled that it would fight any lawsuit on a number of fronts, including the idea that the story played a role in damaging his reputation.

"The essence of a libel claim, of course, is the protection of one's reputation," the paper's legal counsel David McCraw wrote to one of Trump's lawyer's in a letter on Thursday.

"Mr Trump has bragged about his non-consensual touching of women. He has bragged about intruding on beauty pageant contestants in their dressing rooms."

"He acquiesced to a radio host's request to discuss Mr Trump's own daughter as a 'piece of ass.'

"Multiple women not mentioned in our article have publicly come forward to report on Mr Trump's unwanted advances. Nothing in our article has had the slightest effect on the reputation that Mr Trump, through his own words and actions, has already created for himself."

Trump is a public figure and to succeed in a libel case, he would have to prove that the Times knew the story was false, but published it anyway, or that they had reckless disregard for the truth.

READ MORE: New York Times dares Trump to sue