Tabloid killed Trump love child story
Tabloid reportedly stopped pursuing Trump allegations
The company that owns the National Enquirer paid $30,000 to a former Trump office building doorman after a rumor that the president had fathered a child with an employee. The tabloid’s intent was to buy the doorman’s rights to tell what he knew, and then kill the story, news reports say.
The National Enquirer’s parent company paid a New York City doorman $30,000 for a story it never published alleging that Donald Trump secretly fathered a child, according to news reports.
Former doorman Dino Sajudin told the story to the National Enquirer in late 2015, when Trump was the top contender for the Republican presidential nomination, The Associated Press and The New Yorker reported Thursday.
Sajudin, who worked at Trump World Tower near the U.N. headquarters, told the National Enquirer that he’d heard from co-workers that Trump had “knocked up” one of his employees, who gave birth to a girl, according to documents posted on the website of Radar Online, a sister publication of the National Enquirer.
The tabloid requested a polygraph exam, and the examiner concluded that Sajudin was telling the truth about hearing the story, the documents say.
Four unnamed National Enquirer employees told AP that top editors, despite the polygraph results, ordered them to stop reporting the story.
Sajudin signed a contract with the tabloid’s parent company, American Media Inc., led by President Trump’s close friend David Pecker. Sajudin, who received $30,000 in return for giving American Media exclusive rights to the story, agreed to pay a $1 million penalty if he failed to keep quiet, according to the AP and The New Yorker.
It is the second known case of American Media spending money in a way that protected Trump from a potentially harmful story during the 2016 presidential race — a practice known in the tabloid gossip world as “catch and kill.”
Days after Trump won his party’s presidential nomination, American Media paid former Playboy model Karen McDougal $150,000 for exclusive rights to her story of a nine-month affair with Trump, but never published it.
McDougal is suing to void the deal, alleging that her attorney was secretly colluding with Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.
The FBI raided Cohen’s office, home and hotel room this week under search warrants reportedly seeking records on McDougal’s nondisclosure deal with American Media.
The search warrant also reportedly sought records on a separate confidentiality agreement Cohen reached in 2016 with porn star Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford. He set up a shell company that paid Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about Trump’s alleged 2006 sexual encounter with her.
It’s unclear what crimes federal authorities suspect were committed. But McDougal’s lawsuit charges that AMI’s $150,000 payment to her was an illegal secret donation that federal election law required the Trump campaign to publicly disclose.
Common Cause, a nonpartisan ethics group, has filed complaints with the Justice Department and Federal Election Commission alleging that the payments to McDougal and Daniels were illegal campaign contributions.
On Thursday, Common Cause submitted new complaints alleging the payment to Sajudin, too, was an unlawful attempt to influence the 2016 election by protecting Trump’s candidacy from bad publicity.
“Secret payments to hide affairs may have been commonplace in the president’s previous life as a tabloid figure, but when he became a candidate for the presidency, any new payments to safeguard his candidacy became violations of federal law,” said Paul S. Ryan, the vice president for policy and litigation at Common Cause.
Cohen acknowledged that he discussed Sajudin’s story with the National Enquirer when it was reporting on the allegations but denied knowing in advance that the tabloid paid the former doorman $30,000, the AP reported. Neither the AP nor The New Yorker named the woman who allegedly had Trump’s child about 30 years ago.
The documents posted by Radar Online indicate that the National Enquirer found in late 2015 that the woman was then living in the New York City borough of Queens and her daughter in California.
Radar Online reported that despite the polygraph results, National Enquirer editors concluded Sajudin’s story was false.
“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,” Dylan Howard, the chief content officer at American Media, told Radar Online.