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WAUKESHA, WI - MAY 1st: Former president Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally on Wednesday May 1st, 2024.  (Photo by Sara Stathas for the Washington Post)

Former president Donald Trump in a Manhattan courtroom on March 25.

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It was just days before the 2016 presidential election when the Wall Street Journal broke what would eventually snowball into the Trump hush money scandal: The story, under the headline “<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/national-enquirer-shielded-donald-trump-from-playboy-models-affair-allegation-1478309380" target=_blank>National Enquirer Shielded Donald Trump From Playboy Model’s Affair Allegation</a>,” was a clear and clinical scoop showing how American Media Inc. (AMI), owner of the National Enquirer, agreed to pay $150,000 to former Playboy model Karen McDougal for her tale of an affair with Trump.

The Enquirer never ran the story, a trick known among tabloids as “catch and kill.”

The Journal’s piece landed online after 9 p.m. on a Friday night and didn’t even make the front page of the next day’s print edition. <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=karen+mcdougal+trump+national+enquirer+david+pecker&sca_esv=5d0811d5ae0715ef&sca_upv=1&rlz=1C1GCEA_enUS957US957&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A11%2F3%2F2016%2Ccd_max%3A11%2F9%2F2016&tbm=" target=_blank>Pickup from other big-time media outlets was just about nil</a>. Maybe they couldn’t match it; maybe they were reluctant to publish a scandal story so close to the election; maybe they were just exhausted. As two Journal reporters — Joe Palazzolo and Michael Rothfeld — would later write in their book “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Fixers-Bottom-Feeders-Crooked-Gossipmongers-President/dp/0593132394" target=_blank>The Fixers</a>,” then-Trump attorney Michael Cohen boasted to a colleague, “Even CNN [is] not talking about it.”

Well, CNN, and everyone else, is talking about it now. All day long, in live-blog updates and podcasts obsessed with the ongoing hush money trial under way in the Manhattan courtroom of Justice <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/03/31/trump-judge-merchan-indictment/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Juan Merchan</a>.

The turnabout is the handiwork of a competitive New York media scene, and the trial — with all its detail on the Trump-Cohen-AMI schemes — is a good time for an assessment of this riveting and enduring story. The verdict is almost uniformly positive, as scoop after scoop has held up through two criminal investigations. The less glorious dimension relates to a catch-and-kill operation that suppressed a former Trump World Tower doorman’s salacious claims about Trump. Key outlets had confirmed aspects of that story but either declined to publish them or dragged their feet.

Now, the doorman story is playing out in court documents and in testimony — a warning to skittish editors: Killing newsworthy information carries its own risks, as when prosecutors seize on a story you didn’t feel was fit for public consumption.

Though Trump had built up a mythology for baiting beat reporters in New York with <a href="https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/04/2016-donald-trump-tabloids-new-york-post-daily-news-media-213842/" target=_blank>lies, inducements</a> and even an <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/donald-trump-alter-ego-barron/2016/05/12/02ac99ec-16fe-11e6-aa55-670cabef46e0_story.html?asdfk" target=_blank>act in which he masqueraded as his own flack</a>, this wasn’t a piece about his love life or a new Manhattan development. As Trump sought and secured a more serious station — the presidency — New York media outlets guided themselves accordingly, to borrow a bullying formulation from Cohen himself. They kept pounding the story with resources and patience until they blew it apart.

One lesson that emerges from the timeline is that Trump’s best strategy for suppressing one scandal is to litter the public square with other scandals. But over time, sources loosen up, people get tired of being muzzled, and journalists get their story — a dynamic that Trump foresaw in 2016, when he discussed the McDougal catch-and-kill operation with David Pecker, at the time the publisher of the Enquirer.

“Mr. Trump said to me, ‘I don’t buy any stories. Anytime you do anything like this, it always gets out,’” said Pecker <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/04/23/david-pecker-national-enquirer-donald-trump/73428158007/" target=_blank>during his trial testimony</a> this week.

In its underappreciated November 2016 piece, the Journal dangled a mystery before readers and its competitors. It noted that the lawyer who had represented McDougal, Keith Davidson, also represented former adult-film star Stormy Daniels (whose real name is Stephanie Clifford), who had talked with ABC about detailing a past relationship with Trump but “cut off contact” with the network. It would take the Journal another 15 months to flesh out the details of Cohen’s $130,000 hush payment to Daniels, a critical dimension of the Manhattan trial.

Because <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/donald-trump/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Donald Trump</a>. Never before had a president so complicated journalistic triage. Starting with the presidential transition, Trump and his associates were good for an aberrant event or bonkers comment multiple times per week. What to cover? Well, the bylines of Rothfeld or Palazzolo in 2017 appeared on stories about <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/christopher-steele-ex-british-intelligence-officer-said-to-have-prepared-dossier-on-trump-1484162553" target=_blank>the Steele dossier</a>, the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/pitch-for-trump-tower-mumbai-plays-up-connection-to-donald-trump-1501061401" target=_blank>dealings of the Trump Organization</a>, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/paul-manafort-received-loans-from-another-former-trump-advisers-bank-1490779800" target=_blank>Paul Manafort’s finances</a>, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/departure-of-pepsico-lawyer-is-focus-of-sec-probe-1506504603" target=_blank>potential corporate wrongdoing</a>, the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/gun-rights-advocates-score-wins-in-an-unlikely-place-california-1499269167" target=_blank>National Rifle Association</a> and others. The duo also spent time investigating the rumor about a tape of Trump allegedly mistreating his wife Melania in an elevator, though they “eventually came to suspect that the so-called elevator tape was a phantom,” they write in “The Fixers.”

When the reporters caught a break on the Daniels story at end of 2017, however, they hit the phones again. Selectively, however. “We were extremely careful to not do anything that would alert competitors,” recalls Rothfeld, adding that they held off calling sources likely to blab to other media outlets. One thing they could do in secret was hunt for the name of the shell company that Cohen had used to pay off Daniels. They didn’t know the name of the LLC or the state in which it was registered, but they gathered helpful clues from a source and got some critical cooperation from a generous official in the Delaware division of corporations. Finally, they found what they believed to be the right shell company.

Wrong! They’d happened upon the flimsy corporate infrastructure for a different hush job. Soon, they found the right LLC, which bulletproofed Cohen’s connection to the Daniels operation.

On Jan. 12, 2018, the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-lawyer-arranged-130-000-payment-for-adult-film-stars-silence-1515787678" target=_blank>Journal broke open the story</a> with a report on Cohen’s funneling of the Daniels payment (a later story added the LLC component). Though Palazzolo and Rothfeld recall hearing no “footsteps” from other media outlets chasing the story, the New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/us/trump-stephanie-clifford-stormy-daniels.html#:~:text=Trump%2C%20had%20agreed%20during%20the,back%20out%20of%20their%20agreement." target=_blank>published its own piece a little more than two hours later</a>, citing the Journal’s story and reporting on Daniels’s discussions with Slate magazine and ABC News about sharing her experience, along with contractual details. A team at the Times had been working for weeks on the matter.

Cue the scramble. Palazzolo and Rothfeld put together a <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-lawyer-used-private-company-pseudonyms-to-pay-porn-star-stormy-daniels-1516315731" target="_blank">piece on Cohen’s machinations</a>, including the scoop on the LLCs; the Times’s Maggie Haberman, a veteran Trump journo, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/us/politics/stormy-daniels-michael-cohen-trump.html" target="_blank">reported that Cohen dug into his own pockets for the Daniels payout</a>; five Times reporters — Jim Rutenberg (who had reported on Trump in previous posts), Megan Twohey (fresh off of breaking walls of silence on the Times’s Harvey Weinstein investigation), Rebecca Ruiz, Mike McIntire and Haberman — <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/18/us/politics/michael-cohen-trump.html" target="_blank">turned in a comprehensive account of Cohen’s hush money labors</a>; the New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/donald-trump-a-playboy-model-and-a-system-for-concealing-infidelity-national-enquirer-karen-mcdougal" target="_blank">scooped McDougal’s first on-the-record comments about her dealings with AMI</a>. The Journal <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/boss-i-miss-you-so-much-the-awkward-exile-of-michael-cohen-1524767440" target="_blank">reported on Cohen’s “awkward exile” and struggles to get Trump’s attention</a>, one in a collection of stories that won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for Palazzolo, Rothfeld and other Journal reporters.

All three outlets kept at it for months and months, a spell of journalistic exertion that ran into unique obstacles: Expert liars in Cohen and Trump, a tabloid harboring secrets and abstruse contracts, and the physics of covering a porn star. On that last front, a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/stormy-daniels-star-of-the-latest-trump-sideshow-took-her-act-to-a-strip-club-it-was-a-scene/2018/01/21/57a469d2-fe7b-11e7-a46b-a3614530bd87_story.html" target=_blank>platoon of reporters descended on a Greenville, S.C., club in January 2018</a> to see Daniels perform on her “Make America Horny Again” tour. During the performance, Palazzolo recalls, he was positioned with other journalists around the stage. Daniels took his head and pulled it into her breast, he says, a maneuver known in the industry as “motorboating.” In “Stormy,” <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tE7h_TJkxg" target=_blank>a documentary available on the Peacock streaming service</a>, Palazzolo and Rothfeld insisted that the fleshy immersion didn’t happen at Palazzolo’s request. “I was there for the sole purpose of trying to get comment from her,” said Palazzolo, who told me that Daniels “purred into my ear.”

A journalist on the scene told me that he was put off by the sight of another journalist living the story in such tactile fashion. Another person in attendance supported the version of the Journal’s reporters, commenting that Daniels was the “majority stakeholder” in this episode. Whatever the case, <a href="https://www.dowjones.com/code-conduct/" target=_blank>the Dow Jones code of conduct is silent on motorboating.</a>

All this peculiar labor produced astounding results: <a href="https://apnews.com/article/north-america-donald-trump-us-news-ap-top-news-michael-cohen-74aaf72511d64fceb1d64529207bde64" target=_blank>Cohen pleaded guilty in August 2018</a> to federal offenses stemming from the hush money scheme, among others. Prosecutors later <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/12/media/american-media-inc-southern-district-new-york/index.html" target=_blank>inked a non-prosecution agreement with AMI</a>. Now, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecution turns the scandal toward Trump.

One of its<a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-doorman-love-child-story-hush-money-trial.html" target=_blank> strands</a> is the doorman, Dino Sajudin, who in 2015 contacted the Enquirer’s tip line to say he had heard that Trump fathered a “love child” with a Trump employee in the late 1980s. The Enquirer actually dispatched reporters to stand up the claim, and one of them called Trump’s assistant seeking information — a step that prompted a protest from Cohen. Sajudin wound up with a payment of $30,000 for exclusive rights to his story, including a $1 million penalty if he leaked to other outlets. After that, the Enquirer stopped reporting on the piece, giving the entire sequence the look of a catch-and-kill operation.

The Journal got to work on the Sajudin story after the 2016 presidential election. Among the difficulties it encountered was fierce pushback from AMI, which argued that the reason that it didn’t publish the story was that it couldn’t prove it.

Hold on, since when does the Enquirer care about facts? In that spirit, the Journal sent a letter to AMI regarding the evidentiary standards for Sajudin’s piece vs. those for the <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/03/the-national-enquirers-fervor-for-trump" target=_blank>Enquirer’s 2015 “investigation</a>” <a href="https://twitter.com/HeathaT/status/1032701233205837829/photo/1" target=_blank>revealing that Hillary Clinton had six months to live</a>. That salvo drew threats from AMI. The bigger concern, as explained in “The Fixers,” is that the Journal — as well as other media outlets that tilted at the story later — came up empty in nailing down Trump’s alleged paternity. The Journal’s reporters came to agree with AMI that this explosive claim was false, according to Palazzolo.

What’s more, says Palazzolo, they didn’t know at the time the extent of Cohen and Trump’s involvement.

So the Journal took a pass on the story. “I felt like there was a story there, but it was the paper’s call … not to publish it,” recalls Rothfeld, who moved from the Journal to the Times in 2019. “They were concerned about if we say there’s a story about a love child, and it doesn’t appear to be true, people would take the inference that it was true.” Palazzolo says it was a “close call.”

The Associated Press in summer 2017 started work on AMI’s approach to Sajudin’s “love child” claims. Not long before the wire service was set to publish its investigation, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-national-enquirer-a-donald-trump-rumor-and-another-secret-payment-to-buy-silence-dino-sajudin-david-pecker" target=_blank>according to Farrow’s reporting</a>, AMI mounted a legal pushback operation. Weeks later, Sally Buzbee, then the AP’s executive editor (now the top editor at The Post), announced that the story wouldn’t be published, <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2018/04/12/trump-love-child-rumor-media-519213" target=_blank>though she said that outside objections did not force the decision</a>. It wasn’t until April 2018, after Farrow pieced together AMI’s efforts to thwart the AP and was about to publish his own account, that AP finally pulled the trigger. Buzbee told me in 2021 that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/19/what-sally-buzbees-ap-history-suggests-about-how-she-might-manage-post/" target=_blank>the story had gained important corroboration from a federal investigation</a>; two sources said that it hadn’t changed much.

Starting in late 2017, the Times made its own push on the doorman story, picking up details on the contractual elements as well as Cohen’s role in the affair, according to an informed source. The Times decided against publishing the story. (Former Politico media reporter Michael Calderone <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2018/04/12/trump-love-child-rumor-media-519213" target=_blank>reported the Times’s decision years ago</a>.)

The cautious approach to the “love child” story has aged into a shambles. The Sajudin saga, after all, figured into Bragg’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/04/04/nyregion/trump-indictment-annotated.html" target=_blank>statement of facts</a> as an example of hiding “damaging information from the voting public” before the 2016 presidential election. In other words, the machinery of public manipulation was newsworthy from the beginning, however unsubstantiated the underlying “love child” claim. Trump lives in muck; sometimes journalists must wade into the pond to serve the public.

Hamilton College, BA in Government

Georgetown University, MS in Foreign Service

Erik Wemple, The Washington Post's media critic, focuses on the cable-news industry. 

Erik Wemple

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Former US President Trump attends hush money hearing over porn star payment, New York, USA - 25 Mar 2024

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