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Ronan Farrow has done it again: he’s broken a massive story in the New Yorker about a major power player. This time, the power player isn’t Harvey Weinstein. This time the power player is Donald Trump. Farrow details in a new article how Donald Trump’s media cronies have been paying off Trump’s victims and mistresses for years now. The basic gist is that a woman comes forward with a story of how, say, she had an affair with Donald Trump at some point. Her story is credible and believable. She has details and inside information. The owner of the National Enquirer decides to pay the woman to tell her story but only to them – they own her exclusive, and they pay her six figures for it. Then the Enquirer never publishes her story and she can’t tell the story anywhere else. This is what happened to one of Trump’s mistresses circa 2006-07. Her name is Karen McDougal. You can read Farrow’s full story here.

In June, 2006, Donald Trump taped an episode of his reality-television show, “The Apprentice,” at the Playboy Mansion, in Los Angeles. Hugh Hefner, Playboy’s publisher, threw a pool party for the show’s contestants with dozens of current and former Playmates, including Karen McDougal, a slim brunette who had been named Playmate of the Year, eight years earlier. In 2001, the magazine’s readers voted her runner-up for “Playmate of the ’90s,” behind Pamela Anderson. At the time of the party, Trump had been married to the Slovenian model Melania Knauss for less than two years; their son, Barron, was a few months old. Trump seemed uninhibited by his new family obligations. McDougal later wrote that Trump “immediately took a liking to me, kept talking to me – telling me how beautiful I was, etc. It was so obvious that a Playmate Promotions exec said, ‘Wow, he was all over you – I think you could be his next wife.’”

Trump and McDougal began an affair, which McDougal later memorialized in an eight-page, handwritten document provided to The New Yorker by John Crawford, a friend of McDougal’s. When I showed McDougal the document, she expressed surprise that I had obtained it but confirmed that the handwriting was her own.

The interactions that McDougal outlines in the document share striking similarities with the stories of other women who claim to have had sexual relationships with Trump, or who have accused him of propositioning them for sex or sexually harassing them. McDougal describes their affair as entirely consensual. But her account provides a detailed look at how Trump and his allies used clandestine hotel-room meetings, payoffs, and complex legal agreements to keep affairs—sometimes multiple affairs he carried out simultaneously—out of the press.

[From The New Yorker]

Farrow goes on to say that the National Enquirer paid McDougal $150,000 for exclusive rights on her story, which they never ran:

Purchasing a story in order to bury it is a practice that many in the tabloid industry call “catch and kill.” This is a favorite tactic of the C.E.O. and chairman of A.M.I., David Pecker, who describes the President as “a personal friend.” As part of the agreement, A.M.I. consented to publish a regular aging-and-fitness column by McDougal. After Trump won the Presidency, however, A.M.I.’s promises largely went unfulfilled, according to McDougal.

Six former A.M.I. employees told me that Pecker routinely makes catch-and-kill arrangements like the one reached with McDougal. “We had stories and we bought them knowing full well they were never going to run,” Jerry George, a former A.M.I. senior editor who worked at the company for more than twenty-five years, told me. George said that Pecker protected Trump.

“Pecker really considered him a friend,” George told me. “We never printed a word about Trump without his approval.” Maxine Page, who worked at A.M.I. on and off from 2002 to 2012, including as an executive editor at one of the company’s Web sites, said that Pecker also used the unpublished stories as “leverage” over some celebrities in order to pressure them to pose for his magazines or feed him stories. Several former employees said that these celebrities included Arnold Schwarzenegger, as reported by the Los Angeles Times, and Tiger Woods.

[From The New Yorker]

Schwarzenegger denied this and Tiger Woods declined to comment, but I remember the Tiger Woods thing in detail – the Enquirer broke the story of Tiger’s affair with Rachel Uchitel, and that started the chain reaction of revelations about Tiger. The Enquirer had Tiger’s balls in a vice grip for months with those stories. Left unsaid is that the Enquirer also broke the John Edwards story, about his affair and then his mistress’s pregnancy. Maxine Page, who is quoted above, also tells Farrow: “Even though they’re just tabloids, just rags, it’s still a cause of concern. In theory, you would think that Trump has all the power in that relationship, but in fact Pecker has the power—he has the power to run these stories. He knows where the bodies are buried.” So what would it take for Pecker – appropriate name – to turn on Trump?

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