How Karen McDougal’s Story of an Affair With Trump Became a Commodity
In the middle of the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump called David Pecker, publisher of The National Enquirer. The candidate was seeking advice about a former Playboy model who was trying to sell her story of an affair with him, Mr. Pecker told jurors in Mr. Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial.
Mr. Pecker suggested a way to silence the model, Karen McDougal. “I think that the story should be purchased,” he said he told Mr. Trump. “And I believe that you should buy it.”
The episode involving Ms. McDougal led to the second of three hush-money deals that prosecutors say Mr. Trump and his allies arranged during the 2016 election to suppress negative news. Mr. Pecker was involved in all of them, including the final deal in which Mr. Trump’s lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, paid $130,000 to Stormy Daniels, a former porn star.
Mr. Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up the Daniels payment as part of an effort to influence the election. It is the first criminal prosecution of an American president. Mr. Pecker, the trial’s first witness, began testifying about Ms. McDougal on Tuesday before the trial’s midweek break and continued Thursday.
The Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc., ended up paying $150,000 to buy the rights to her story and then bury it, a tactic known as “catch and kill.” In a deal to avoid federal prosecution, the company later admitted that it had illegally tried to influence the election.
Ms. McDougal had been Playboy’s Playmate of the Year for 1998. She has said she met Mr. Trump at the Playboy Mansion in June 2006, and they began a 10-month affair.