Trump doorman got $30G, tale squashed
A FORMER TRUMP building doorman confirmed Thursday that he told The National Enquirer the real estate baron-turned-President sired a love child with his housekeeper.
Dino Sajudin’s stunning admission came hours after it was reported that the supermarket tabloid’s publisher paid $30,000 to silence him.
“Today I awoke to learn that a confidential agreement that I had with (National Enquirer publisher American Media Inc.) with regard to a story about President Trump was leaked to the press,” Dino Sajudin said.
“I can confirm that while working at Trump World Tower I was instructed not to criticize President Trump’s former housekeeper due to a prior relationship she had with President Trump which produced a child.”
Sajudin told an Enquirer reporter that he heard two Trump employees — including longtime security chief Matt Calamari — say the real estate baron fathered a daughter with an ex-staffer in the 1980s, according to reports in The Associated Press and The New Yorker.
Sajudin even passed a lie detector test in late 2015.
But the magazine deep-sixed the story as part of its catch-and-kill strategy, paying for and then burying stories about Trump and other friends of magazine owner David Pecker, the reports say.
Neither the AP nor The New Yorker confirmed Sajudin’s claims — and the Trump Organization sharply denied them Thursday.
“Mr. Sajudin’s claims are completely false,” the Trump Organization said in a statement.
A spokesman added that Calamari never uttered such a statement — and accused Sajudin of having a history of peddling bogus stories.
The alleged love child declined comment. But the former housekeeper also sharply denied the tawdry tale.
“This is all fake,” she told the AP. “I think they lost their money.”
Their names are being withheld by the Daily News.
Sajudin’s ex-wife told The News she didn’t buy the story either. Nikki Benfatto described her former husband as “a pathological liar.”
“He’s infamous for making up stories,” Benfatto said of her husband of 14 years.
“He’s seen the chupacabra. He’s seen Bigfoot. One of our friends who passed away, he saw him too, walking down the street.”
Benfatto said she stopped communicating with her ex in 2014 after he threatened her and spread false rumors about her online.
A source close to Sajudin claimed his former wife is bitter because she lost custody of their two children.
The seamy allegation emerged days after FBI agents raided the home, office and hotel room of longtime Trump fixer Michael Cohen. The agents were reportedly searching for a raft of incriminating documents, including files tied to National Enquirer publisher AMI.
Among the records sought were documents about Karen McDougal, the ex-Playboy model who sued AMI for silencing her with a $150,000 payment for a story on her alleged affair with Trump in 2006.
Cohen has also admitted to paying porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 weeks before the election to keep quiet about her claimed tryst with Trump.
Cohen confirmed to the AP that he had discussed Sajudin’s story with Enquirer executives when the magazine was looking into it.
AMI employees speculated to the New Yorker that company executives had him in the loop about Sajudin’s story.
“Cohen was kept up to date on a regular basis,” one unnamed source told The New Yorker.
AMI denied Trump or Cohen “had anything to do with its decision not to pursue a story about a ‘love child’ that it determined was not credible.
“The suggestion that David Pecker has ever used company funds to ‘shut down’ this or any investigation is not true,” the company added.
Radar Online, a sister publication to the Enquirer, published a story late Wednesday saying that editors at the Enquirer believed Sajudin’s tale was not true.
“When we realized we would be unable to publish, and other media outlets approached the source about his tale, we released Sajudin from the exclusivity clause that had accompanied his $30,000 payment, freeing him to tell his story to whomever he wanted,” AMI Chief Content Officer Dylan Howard told Radar.
But some Enquirer staffers said the magazine didn’t show its usual aggressiveness in seeking to confirm the story.
“We didn’t pay thousands of dollars for nonstories, let alone tens of thousands,” an AMI employee told The New Yorker. “It was a highly curious and questionable situation.”
Another AMI source said the story was bottled up after Sajudin passed the polygraph. A week after the results came in, the former doorman signed the agreement paying him $30,000 immediately and subjecting him to a $1 million penalty if he shopped around his information.
“The decision was made at a high level to pay this source those funds and to put this thing to rest without an investigation taking place,” an AMI source said.
But a reporter on the story recalled there was a great deal of doubt over Sajudin’s accusations.
“I believed from the beginning it was not true,” Sharon Churcher told The New Yorker.
Sajudin, in a brief interview with The News at his home in the Poconos, said he was struggling to deal with the sudden attention.
“It’s a bit much, you know? It wasn’t supposed to be out there anyway,” Sajudin said as he peeked through his door. “Two days, everything was normal. Now it’s crazy. It’s a bit much.”