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.
On November 4, 2016, four days before the election, the Wall Street Journal reported that American Media, Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer,
had paid a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for exclusive rights to
McDougal’s story, which it 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. Last month, the Journal reported
that Trump’s personal lawyer had negotiated a separate agreement just
before the election with an adult-film actress named Stephanie Clifford,
whose screen name is Stormy Daniels, which barred her from discussing
her own affair with Trump. Since then, A.M.I. has repeatedly approached
McDougal about extending her contract.
McDougal,
in her first on-the-record comments about A.M.I.’s handling of her
story, declined to discuss the details of her relationship with Trump,
for fear of violating the agreement she reached with the company. She
did say, however, that she regretted signing the contract. “It took my
rights away,” McDougal told me. “At this point I feel I can’t talk about
anything without getting into trouble, because I don’t know what I’m
allowed to talk about. I’m afraid to even mention his name.”
A
White House spokesperson said in a statement that Trump denies having
had an affair with McDougal: “This is an old story that is just more
fake news. The President says he never had a relationship with
McDougal.” A.M.I. said that an amendment to McDougal’s contract—signed
after Trump won the election—allowed her to “respond to legitimate press
inquiries” regarding the affair. The company said that it did not print
the story because it did not find it credible.
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.
(Schwarzenegger, through an attorney, denied this claim. Woods did not
respond to requests for comment.) “Even though they’re just tabloids,
just rags, it’s still a cause of concern,” Page said. “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.”
As
the pool party at the Playboy Mansion came to an end, Trump asked for
McDougal’s telephone number. For McDougal, who grew up in a small town
in Michigan and worked as a preschool teacher before beginning her
modelling career, such advances were not unusual. John Crawford,
McDougal’s friend, who also helped broker her deal with A.M.I., said
that Trump was “another powerful guy
hitting on her, a gal who’s paid to be at work.” Trump and McDougal
began talking frequently on the phone, and soon had what McDougal
described as their first date: dinner in a private bungalow at the
Beverly Hills Hotel. McDougal wrote that Trump impressed her. “I was so
nervous! I was into his intelligence + charm. Such a polite man,” she
wrote. “We talked for a couple hours – then, it was “ON”! We got naked +
had sex.” As McDougal was getting dressed to leave, Trump did something
that surprised her. “He offered me money,” she wrote. “I looked at him
(+ felt sad) + said, ‘No thanks - I’m not ‘that girl.’ I slept w/you
because I like you - NOT for money’ - He told me ‘you are special.’ ”
Afterward,
McDougal wrote, she “went to see him every time he was in LA (which was
a lot).” Trump, she said, always stayed in the same bungalow at the
Beverly Hills Hotel and ordered the same meal—steak and mashed
potatoes—and never drank. McDougal’s account is consistent with other
descriptions of Trump’s behavior. Last month, In Touch Weekly
published an interview conducted in 2011 with Stephanie Clifford in
which she revealed that during a relationship with Trump she met him for
dinner at a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Trump insisted
they watch “Shark Week” on the Discovery Channel. Summer Zervos, a
former contestant on “The Apprentice,” alleged that Trump assaulted her
at a private dinner meeting, in December of 2007, at a bungalow at the
Beverly Hills Hotel. Trump, Zervos has claimed, kissed her, groped her
breast, and suggested that they lie down to “watch some telly-telly.”
After Zervos rebuffed Trump’s advances, she said that he “began
thrusting his genitals” against her. (Zervos recently sued Trump for
defamation after he denied her account.) All three women say that they
were escorted to a bungalow at the hotel by a Trump bodyguard, whom two
of the women have identified as Keith Schiller. After Trump was elected,
Schiller was appointed director of Oval Office Operations and deputy
assistant to the President. Last September, John Kelly, acting as the
new chief of staff, removed Schiller from the White House posts.
(Schiller did not respond to a request for comment.)
Over
the course of the affair, Trump flew McDougal to public events across
the country but hid the fact that he paid for her travel. “No paper
trails for him,” she wrote. “In fact, every time I flew to meet him, I
booked/paid for flight + hotel + he reimbursed me.” In July, 2006,
McDougal joined Trump at the American Century Celebrity Golf
Championship, at the Edgewood Resort, on Lake Tahoe. At a party there,
she and Trump sat in a booth with the New Orleans Saints quarterback
Drew Brees, and Trump told her that Brees had recognized her, remarking,
“Baby, you’re popular.” (Brees, through a spokesman, denied meeting
Trump or McDougal at the event.) At another California golf event, Trump
told McDougal that Tiger Woods had asked who she was. Trump, she
recalled, warned her “to stay away from that one, LOL.”
During
the Lake Tahoe tournament, McDougal and Trump had sex, she wrote. He
also allegedly began a sexual relationship with Clifford at the event.
(A representative for Clifford did not respond to requests for comment.)
In the 2011 interview with In Touch Weekly,
Clifford said that Trump didn’t use a condom and didn’t mention
sleeping with anyone else. Another adult-film actress, whose screen name
is Alana Evans, claimed that Trump invited her to join them in his
hotel room that weekend. A third adult-film performer, known as Jessica
Drake, alleged that Trump asked her to his hotel room, met her and two
women she brought with her in pajamas, and then “grabbed each of us
tightly in a hug and kissed each one of us without asking for
permission.” He then offered Drake ten thousand dollars in exchange for
her company. (Trump denied the incident.) A week after the golf
tournament, McDougal joined Trump at the fifty-fifth Miss Universe
contest, in Los Angeles. She sat near him, and later attended an
after-party where she met celebrities. Trump also set aside tickets for
Clifford, as he did at a later vodka launch that both women attended.
During
Trump’s relationship with McDougal, she wrote, he introduced her to
members of his family and took her to his private residences. At a
January, 2007, launch party in Los Angeles for Trump’s now-defunct
liquor brand, Trump Vodka, McDougal, who was photographed entering the
event, recalled sitting at a table with Kim Kardashian, Trump, Donald
Trump, Jr., and Trump, Jr.,’s wife, Vanessa, who was pregnant. At one
point, Trump held a party for “The Apprentice” at the Playboy Mansion,
and McDougal worked as a costumed Playboy bunny. “We took pics together,
alone + with his family,” McDougal wrote. She recalled that Trump said
he had asked his son Eric “who he thought was the most beautiful girl
here + Eric pointed me. Mr. T said ‘He has great taste’ + we laughed!”
Trump gave McDougal tours of Trump Tower and his Bedminster, New Jersey,
golf club. In Trump Tower, McDougal wrote, Trump pointed out Melania’s
separate bedroom. He “said she liked her space,” McDougal wrote, “to
read or be alone.”
McDougal’s account, like those of Clifford
and other women who have described Trump’s advances, conveys a man
preoccupied with his image. McDougal recalled that Trump would often
send her articles about him or his daughter, as well as signed books and
sun visors from his golf courses. Clifford recalled Trump remarking
that she and Ivanka were similar and proudly showing her a copy of a “money magazine” with his image on the cover.
Trump
also promised to buy McDougal an apartment in New York as a Christmas
present. Clifford, likewise, said that Trump promised to buy her a condo
in Tampa. For Trump, showing off real estate and other branded products
was sometimes a prelude to sexual advances. Zervos and a real-estate
investor named Rachel Crooks have both claimed that Trump kissed them on
the mouth during professional encounters at Trump Tower. Four other
women have claimed that Trump forcibly touched or kissed them during
tours or events at Mar-a-Lago, his property in Palm Beach, Florida. (Trump has denied any wrongdoing pertaining to the women.)
McDougal
ended the relationship in April, 2007, after nine months. According to
Crawford, the breakup was prompted in part by McDougal’s feelings of
guilt.
“She couldn’t look at herself in the mirror anymore,” Crawford
said. “And she was concerned about what her mother thought of her.” The
decision was reinforced by a series of comments Trump made that McDougal
found disrespectful, according to several of her friends. When she
raised her concern about her mother’s disapproval to Trump, he replied,
“What, that old hag?” (McDougal, hurt, pointed out that Trump and her
mother were close in age.) On the night of the Miss Universe pageant
McDougal attended, McDougal and a friend rode with Trump in his
limousine and the friend mentioned a relationship she had had with an
African-American man. According to multiple sources, Trump remarked that
the friend liked “the big black dick” and began commenting on her
attractiveness and breast size. The interactions angered the friend and
deeply offended McDougal.
Speaking carefully
for fear of legal reprisal, McDougal responded to questions about
whether she felt guilty about the affair, as her friends suggested, by
saying that she had found God in the last several years and regretted
parts of her past. “This is a new me,” she told me. “If I could go back
and do a lot of things differently, I definitely would.”
McDougal
readily admitted that she voluntarily sold the rights to her story, but
she and sources close to her insisted that the way the sale unfolded
was exploitative. Crawford told me that selling McDougal’s story was his
idea, and that he first raised it when she was living with him, in
2016. “She and I were sitting at the house, and I’m watching him on
television,” Crawford said, referring to Trump. “I said, ‘You know, if
you had a physical relationship with him, that could be worth something
about now.’ And I looked at her and she had that guilty look on her
face.”
McDougal, who says she is a Republican,
told me that she was reluctant at first to tell her story, because she
feared that other Trump supporters might accuse her of fabricating it,
or might even harm her or her family. She also said that she didn’t want
to get involved in the heated Presidential contest. “I didn’t want to
influence anybody’s election,” she told me. “I didn’t want death threats
on my head.” Crawford was only able to persuade her to consider
speaking about the relationship after a former friend of McDougal’s
began posting about the affair on social media. “I didn’t want someone
else telling stories and getting all the details wrong,” McDougal said.
Crawford
called a friend who had worked in the adult-film industry who he
thought might have media connections, and asked whether a story about
Trump having an affair would “be worth something.” That friend, Crawford
recalled, was “like a hobo on a ham sandwich” and contacted an attorney
named Keith M. Davidson, who also had contacts in the adult-film
industry and ties to media companies, including A.M.I. Davidson had
developed a track record of selling salacious stories. A slide show on
the clients page of his Web site includes Sara Leal, who claimed to have
slept with the actor Ashton Kutcher while he was married to Demi Moore.
Davidson told Crawford that McDougal’s story would be worth “millions.”
(Davidson did not respond to a request for comment.)
Dozens of pages of e-mails, texts, and legal documents obtained by The New Yorker
reveal how the transaction evolved. Davidson got in touch with A.M.I.,
and on June 20, 2016, he and McDougal met Dylan Howard, A.M.I.’s chief
content officer. E-mails between Howard and Davidson show that A.M.I.
initially had little interest in the story. Crawford said that A.M.I.’s
first offer was ten thousand dollars.
After
Trump won the Republican nomination, however, A.M.I. increased its
offer. In an August, 2016, e-mail exchange, Davidson encouraged McDougal
to sign the deal. McDougal, worried that she would be prevented from
talking about a Presidential nominee, asked questions about the nuances
of the contract. Davidson responded, “If you deny, you are safe.” He
added, “We really do need to get this signed and wrapped up...”
McDougal, who has a new lawyer, Carol Heller, told me that she did not understand the scope of the agreement when she
signed it. “I knew that I couldn’t talk about any alleged affair with
any married man, but I didn’t really understand the whole content of
what I gave up,” she told me.
On August 5,
2016, McDougal signed a limited life-story rights agreement granting
A.M.I. exclusive ownership of her account of any romantic, personal, or
physical relationship she has ever had with any “then-married man.” Her
retainer with Davidson makes explicit that the man in question was
Donald Trump. In exchange, A.M.I. agreed to pay her a hundred and fifty
thousand dollars. The three men involved in the deal—Davidson, Crawford,
and their intermediary in the adult-film industry—took forty-five per
cent of the payment as fees, leaving McDougal with a total of eighty-two
thousand five hundred dollars, billing records from Davidson’s office
show. “I feel let down,” McDougal told me. “I’m the one who took it, so
it’s my fault, too. But I didn’t understand the full parameters of it.”
McDougal terminated her representation by Davidson, but a photograph of
McDougal in a bathing suit is still featured prominently on his Web
site—according to McDougal, without her permission. The Wall Street Journal
reported that, two months after McDougal signed the agreement with
A.M.I., Davidson negotiated a nondisclosure agreement between Clifford
and Trump’s longtime personal lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, for a
hundred and thirty thousand dollars. (On Tuesday, Cohen told the Times
that he had facilitated the deal with Daniels and paid the money out of
his own pocket. Cohen did not respond to a request for comment.)
As
voters went to the polls on Election Day, Howard and A.M.I.’s general
counsel were on the phone with McDougal and a law firm representing her,
promising to boost McDougal’s career and offering to employ a publicist
to help her handle interviews. E-mails show that, a year into the
contract, the company suggested it might collaborate with McDougal on a
skin-care line and a documentary devoted to a medical cause that she
cares about, neither of which has come about. The initial contract also
called for A.M.I. to publish regular columns by McDougal on aging and
wellness, and to “prominently feature” her on two magazine covers. She
has appeared on one cover and is in discussions about another, but in
the past seventeen months the company has published only a fraction of
the almost one hundred promised columns. “They blew her off for a long
time,” Crawford said. A.M.I. said that McDougal had not delivered the
promised columns.
A.M.I. responded quickly, however, when journalists tried to interview McDougal. In May, 2017, The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin, who was writing a profile of David Pecker,
asked McDougal for comment about her relationships with A.M.I. and
Trump. Howard, of A.M.I., working with a publicist retained by the
company, forwarded McDougal a draft response with the subject line “SEND
THIS.” In August, 2017, Pecker flew McDougal to New York and the two
had lunch, during which he thanked her for her loyalty. A few days
later, Howard followed up by e-mail, summarizing the plans that had been
discussed, including the possibility of McDougal hosting A.M.I.’s
coverage of awards shows such as the Golden Globes, Grammys, and Oscars.
None of that work materialized. (A.M.I. said that those conversations
related to future contracts, not her current one.)
A.M.I.’s
interest in McDougal seemed to increase after news broke of Trump’s
alleged affair with Clifford. Howard sent an e-mail suggesting that
McDougal undergo media training, and a few days later suggested that she
could host coverage of the Emmys for OK! Magazine.
In an e-mail on January 30th, A.M.I.’s general counsel, Cameron
Stracher, talked about renewing her contract and putting her on a new
magazine cover. The subject line of the e-mail read, “McDougal contract
extension.” Crawford told me, “They got worried that she was going to
start talking again, and they came running to her.”
Several
people close to McDougal argued that such untold stories could be used
as leverage against the President. “I’m sixty-two years old,” Crawford
said. “I know how the world goes round.” Without commenting on Trump
specifically, McDougal conceded that she had a growing awareness of the
broader implications of the President’s situation. “Someone in a high
position that controls our country, if they can influence him,” she
said, “it’s a big deal.” In a statement, A.M.I. denied that it had any
leverage over Trump: “The suggestion that AMI holds any influence over
the President of the United States, while flattering, is laughable.”
McDougal
fears that A.M.I. will retaliate for her public comments by seeking
financial damages in a private arbitration process mandated by a clause
of her contract. But she said that changes in her life and the emergence
of the #MeToo
moment had prompted her to speak. In January, 2017, McDougal had her
breast implants removed, citing declining health that she believed to be
connected to the implants. McDougal said that confronting illness, and
embracing a cause she wanted to speak about, made her feel increasingly
conflicted about the moral compromises of silence. “As I was sick and
feeling like I was dying and bedridden, all I could do was pray to live.
But now I pray to live right, and make right with the wrongs that I
have done,” she told me. McDougal also cited the actions of women who
have come forward in recent months to describe abuses by high-profile
men. “I know it’s
a different circumstance,” she said, “but I just think I feel braver.”
McDougal told me that she hoped speaking out might convince others to
wait before signing agreements like hers. “Every girl who speaks,” she
said, “is paving the way for another.”
Due
to editing errors, an earlier version of this story misstated the legal
name of the adult-film actress Alana Evans. The number of published
McDougal columns has also been updated.
Ronan
Farrow, a television and print reporter, is the author of the upcoming
book “War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American
Influence.” He is a contributing writer for the magazine.
The New Yorker
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