BRACE YOURSELF, NYC, IT’S DON VS. PORN STAR
Hush money case will be first time in history a former president faces criminal trial — all while he’s again vying for White House
For the first time in the nation’s history, a former U.S. president will face a criminal trial Monday when jury selection begins in District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against Donald Trump stemming from an illicit hush money payoff to porn star Stormy Daniels.
The scheme at the heart of the case has long been public knowledge, first hitting the headlines in January 2018 when a bombshell story in The Wall Street Journal reported that Michael Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer, in a scheme to secure Trump’s win in the 2016 presidential election, had paid for the silence of a porn star who claimed she slept with Trump.
The twists and turns in the ensuing years saw Cohen flip on Trump and go to prison, Daniels become a household name — disparaged endlessly by the former president on social media — and too many book deals to list.
The sensational saga is poised to reach its crescendo when the main characters collide at the 100 Centre St. trial, where a jury of Manhattanites will weigh whether Trump committed crimes the last time he was within reach of the presidency as he vies for another victory this November.
Here’s a refresher on what to know about the historic hush money case:
What is the trial going to look like?
Trump and his Secret Service entourage are expected to descend on the lower Manhattan courthouse around 9 a.m. Monday, along with throngs of reporters, photographers, prospective jurors and potentially protesters.
The trial is expected to last six weeks, including the jury selection process, which could take weeks as the judge and both sides sift through hundreds of New Yorkers to find 12 unbiased jurors and six alternates.
Unlike his past civil trials, Trump is expected to be present in the downtown courthouse every day unless he requests otherwise.
What crimes is Trump accused of?
The former president is accused of repeatedly and fraudulently falsifying New York business records to disguise a hush money scheme that hid potentially damaging information about his past from the voting public.
Prosecutors say the scheme started in August 2015 at Trump Tower, where Trump met Cohen and David Pecker, the chairman of American Media Inc., the company that formerly owned the National Enquirer, to devise a plan to “catch and kill” stories that could be damaging to his candidacy. Pecker agreed to be the Trump campaign’s “eyes and ears” and to alert Cohen when anything arose so they could negotiate exclusive rights to stories that they would never publish. Both American Media Inc. and Cohen have admitted to their roles.
Among those Trump sought to keep mum about his lurid misdeeds, prosecutors say, were:
l Daniels, who alleges that Trump cheated on his wife, Melania, with her at a 2006 Lake Tahoe golf tournament, less than a year after the birth of his youngest child.
l Karen McDougal, a Playboy model who alleged she had a nine-month affair with Trump in 2006
l Dino Sajudin, a doorman at Trump Tower trying to sell a story alleging Trump fathered a child out of wedlock.
Trump faces 34 felony counts representing 11 checks reimbursed to Cohen for facilitating the scheme totaling $420,000, 11 related invoices and 12 ledger entries. Prosecutors allege that he falsely recorded the payments as “legal expenses” and retainer fees to cover up a second crime — the hush money scheme that violated election laws — constituting Class E felony offenses.
According to the DA’s case and admissions by Cohen and Pecker in Cohen’s 2018 federal case, Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 and handled related hush money expenses, and American Media Inc. made a $150,000 payoff to McDougal and $30,000 to the doorman.
Why is this case being tried eight years later?
Within a year of the public learning about the hush money scheme, Cohen had turned on Trump, copped to doing his dirty work, and was on his way to federal prison. But it looked like the former president would emerge unscathed.
Feds at the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office notoriously implicated Trump in their case against Cohen as “Individual-1.” Still, they declined to pursue charges per a Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president. In July 2019, a judge revealed the feds’ campaign finance probe had ended.
About a year after Cohen’s conviction, then-Manhattan DA Cy Vance Jr. revived a probe into the hush money scheme that expanded to include Trump’s business dealings. But after years of investigating Trump, Vance left office without filing an indictment, leaving the decision up to his successor, Bragg.
The DA quickly clashed with investigators hired by the previous administration eager for him to immediately green-light charges against Trump.
The conflict exploded into public view less than two months into his tenure when former prosecutors Mark Pomerantz and Carey Dunne dramatically quit and Pomerantz’s leaked resignation letter claimed Trump was guilty of numerous felonies and that it was the new DA’s “grave failure of justice” not to bring a case.
Pomerantz went on to write a controversial book about why he quit, while Bragg promised the public he hadn’t made up his mind.
Less than a year later, he began presenting evidence to a new grand jury about the hush money scheme and secured an indictment against Trump on March 30, 2023. State Attorney General Letitia James ultimately brought a business fraud case against Trump in the civil courts, recently culminating in almost half a billion dollars in penalties, which Trump is appealing.
What is Michael Cohen’s role?
Trump’s longtime fixer-turned-bitter enemy is expected to be the DA’s star witness and has cooperated extensively since he went to prison for Trump.
Months after the feds raided his residences in April 2018 — and Cohen told The News he wasn’t worried — Trump’s bulldog attorney agreed to plead guilty to violating campaign finance laws by carrying out the hush money scheme at his former boss’ behest. He also admitted to tax evasion and lying to Congress about Trump’s business dealings with Moscow and, in 2018, cooperated during special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian election interference.
Cohen sought to cooperate with the feds to receive a more lenient sentence but refused to be fully truthful and got a three-year term for what the late Judge William Pauley described as “a veritable smorgasbord of fraudulent conduct.”
He served the latter half of his sentence at his Trump Park Avenue apartment on account of the COVID-19 pandemic and was briefly thrown back in prison when he refused not to write a book about Trump while under house arrest.
Pecker and since-twice convicted Trump Organization finance chief Allen Weisselberg were among those to receive immunity in the feds’ investigation into Cohen.
What has Stormy Daniels said about Trump?
When she testified at the January 2022 trial of her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, for stealing advance proceeds from her memoir “Full Disclosure,” Daniels pushed back on descriptions of her rendezvous with Trump at the charity golf tournament as an “affair.”
“Because it was not romantic,” she said. “I don’t consider getting cornered coming out of a bathroom to be an affair.”
Daniels’ book made quite the splash, in which she likened the then-president’s penis to a “toadstool” with “Yeti pubes” and the “mushroom character in Mario Kart.”
Could Trump go to prison?
The charges could land Trump in prison for up to four years.
That said, it’s unlikely Trump would serve time as a first-time, nonviolent offender, should he be convicted.
What happens if Trump loses the case and wins the election?
Nothing.
He can be found guilty and still serve as president, but he would not be able to pardon himself of state charges. But the trial heavily interferes with Trump’s campaign plans, and a criminal conviction could impact how some voters view him as a candidate before they head to the ballot box.
The presumed GOP nominee is facing three other criminal cases, but it’s unclear whether any will make it to trial before Nov. 8. In Washington, D.C., and Georgia, Trump is accused of election interference, and in Florida he’s been indicted for illegally hoarding highly sensitive classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and his New Jersey golf course, and obstructing investigators in that case. He’s pleaded not guilty to all charges.
The key characters in Donald Trump’s hush money case — including Stormy Daniels, Karen McDougal, Michael Cohen, David Pecker and Allen Weisselberg — all have interesting stories to tell about their roles in the infamous scheme.
Prosecutors allege the notorious hush money case started with an August 2015 meeting at Trump Tower between Trump, Cohen and Pecker where they arranged a plan to bury negative stories about Trump to secure his win in the 2016 election. The scheme included paying off porn star Daniels, Playboy model McDougal and a Trump Tower doorman.
The hush money recipients did not stay silent for long, and Trump is the only alleged participant prosecutors have placed at the meeting who still denies wrongdoing. He has not denied the payments to Cohen that serve as the basis for the charges but claims he wasn’t in the loop about the hush money.
STORMY DANIELS
The porn star’s account of Trump’s hush money payment of $130,000 in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election after their alleged tryst 10 years earlier in a Lake Tahoe hotel room, a year after he married his wife, Melania, is central to the case. She is expected to be a key witness at the trial. Daniels, 45, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, was thrust into the political spotlight in 2018 when news of the payments went public.
The Louisiana native sued Trump for defamation in the same year, based on a tweet Trump wrote suggesting Daniels had lied about being threatened not to go public about the affair with the president.
The attorney who repped Daniels in the case, Michael Avenatti, featured as a bit player in the hush money saga. Starting as a liberal resistance hero and Trump-world villain — even flirting with a presidential run — Avenatti was later convicted of stealing from the client who made him famous, and other crimes. He is currently serving a 14-year prison sentence.
MICHAEL COHEN
Cohen is expected to feature as the DA’s star witness at trial and walk jurors through how he covertly carried out the hush money scheme.
After he was sentenced to three years for violating campaign finance laws, lying to Congress and tax evasion, he began voluntarily cooperating against Trump in the Manhattan district attorney’s probe, meeting more than a dozen times with investigators over several years.
When the feds raided Cohen’s residences in April 2018, Trump tried to stop him from cooperating with prosecutors, telling his fixer on a phone call to “stay strong,” according to court records. Around a week later, Trump publicly encouraged Cohen on Twitter not to “flip,” writing, “Most people will flip if the Government lets them out of trouble, even if … it means lying or making up stories. Sorry, I don’t see [Cohen] doing that. … ”
In August 2018, Cohen admitted in Manhattan Federal Court that in 2016 “in coordination with and at the direction of” Trump and Pecker, chairman of American Media, Inc., the former owner of The National Enquirer, he worked “for the principal purpose of influencing the election” to silence women who claimed they’d had extramarital liaisons with Trump.
Cohen, 57, says he paid the porn star’s lawyer through a shell corporation and received reimbursement the following year through a series of monthly checks processed by the Trump Organization and signed by Trump — partially doled out by a trust created after he was elected president and partly from his personal bank account — that were falsely classified as payment for legal fees.
The former fixer is expected to face a grilling on cross-examination by Trump’s defense team, who say he’s a liar who can’t be trusted.
DAVID PECKER
Pecker, a longtime ally of the ex-president, is expected to testify at the trial.
The feds revealed that they’d offered a nonprosecution deal to American Media, Inc. after Cohen’s conviction in exchange for the company’s admission that it paid McDougal to ensure she “did not publicize damaging allegations” about Trump “before the 2016 presidential election and thereby influence that election.”
Pecker, 72, is expected to testify that during a 2015 meeting with Trump and Cohen he agreed to act as the Trump campaign’s “eyes and ears” by identifying damaging stories to “catch and kill” — meaning purchasing stories but never printing them — and publishing stories that could harm his competitors’ chances.
KAREN MCDOUGAL
The former Playboy model has said she had a nine-month relationship with Trump in 2006 and 2007, before his presidency.
She wrote in a personal diary later obtained by the New Yorker that Trump introduced her to his family, brought her to his private room at the Beverly Hills Hotel and showed her his wife’s separate bedroom in Trump Tower.
They had sex “many dozen times,” she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in 2018.
McDougal, 53, met Trump when he was filming an episode of “The Celebrity Apprentice.” She said she ended the relationship because she felt guilty about Trump’s wife and young son. She spoke out after Daniels did.
ALLEN WEISSELBERG
Weisselberg is not expected to take the stand at the trial. Neither side is expected to call him as a witness, and he has resisted efforts by prosecutors to get him to cooperate.
But Trump’s twice-convicted former finance chief — who last week was sent to jail for a second time in as many years for perjuring himself in the company’s civil fraud case, having previously done time for committing tax fraud at Trump’s company — is alleged to have played an important role in the hush money scheme.
Weisselberg, 76, received immunity to testify in the feds’ case against Cohen, who, in his 2019 testimony before Congress, said the former Trump finance chief was the one who determined how he got paid back after Trump won the presidency.
“I obviously wanted the money in one shot. I would have preferred it that way,” Cohen testified. “But in order to be able to put it onto the books, Allen Weisselberg made the decision that it should be paid over the 12 months so that it would look like a retainer.”