In the spring of 2018, I knocked on the door of a gray clapboard house in the Poconos, in eastern Pennsylvania. I was there to ask its owner, a former Trump Tower doorman named Dino Sajudin, about a document I had obtained that showed American Media, Inc., the former parent company of the National Enquirer, had bought his silence during the run-up to the 2016 Presidential election. A contract said that the company had paid Sajudin thirty thousand dollars, in late 2015, for the exclusive rights to a rumor that Donald Trump may have fathered a child with a former employee in the late nineteen-eighties. The agreement imposed a million-dollar penalty on Sajudin if he disclosed the information elsewhere. Sajudin briefly listened to my request for an interview, demanded payment for talking, then shut the door in my face.
The following year, after I wrote a story for The New Yorker about the payment to Sajudin and the role of A.M.I. in suppressing damaging stories about Trump, he agreed to talk to me for a podcast version of “Catch and Kill,” a book I wrote about tactics used by Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump to suppress stories. At a studio in Brooklyn, in 2019, Sajudin recounted his experiences with Trump and A.M.I. to me for several hours. “You were asking me questions about this—this contract, and this gag clause,” Sajudin told me, recalling the encounter at his door. “I was, like, Holy crap, where’d this guy get this information from? How’d this get out? I says, ‘I’m not supposed to be sayin’ nothin’. Who would leak this?’ ” The New Yorker has uncovered no evidence that Trump fathered the child. The alleged daughter and her mother both declined to comment, and the father of the family told me it wasn’t true. But the transaction, which I confirmed by interviewing half a dozen A.M.I. employees with knowledge of the agreement, was part of a pattern of concealment, orchestrated by Trump and A.M.I., before the election. “The whole fact that they covered it up is what made this a big story,” Sajudin told me.
Unbeknownst to Sajudin, several months before he received his payment, Trump had met with Michael Cohen, his personal attorney at the time, and David Pecker, then the chief executive of A.M.I. The three men formalized a scheme in which Pecker and A.M.I. agreed to buy the rights to incriminating stories on behalf of Trump’s campaign and never publish them. The practice of purchasing a story in order to suppress it is known in tabloid circles as “catch and kill.”
The alleged scheme is at the heart of the thirty-four-count criminal indictment filed against Trump by a Manhattan grand jury which resulted in the former President’s arraignment on Tuesday. A statement of facts released by the District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, described the transaction with Sajudin, along with subsequent payments intended to secure the silence of two women who both claimed to have had affairs with Trump. Prosecutors argue that those payments were part of a years-long conspiracy to hide “damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 election.”
On Wednesday, when I reached out to Sajudin to ask him about his reaction to the indictment, he told me that Bragg’s office never got in touch with him. In a statement issued through his lawyer, Sajudin said, “I was in complete shock when I was informed by my Attorney that I was cited in the statement of facts related to former President Trump’s Indictment as I was not given any forewarning that I would be included. I was never asked to appear before the Grand Jury, nor was I ever interviewed by the District Attorney’s Office.” Other sources also told me they had not been contacted—among them was Daniel Portley-Hanks, the private investigator hired by A.M.I. to look into the accuracy of Sajudin’s rumor. “I even recently called the prosecutor’s office and gave them my information. No one ever called me back,” Portley-Hanks told me this week. “Their investigators need to do a better job if they want this case to stick. Right now, all they have is David Pecker’s word that what he did was under the direction of Donald Trump. However, other people in that office also knew what was going on.”
Douglas Cohen, a spokesperson for Bragg’s office, declined to comment. A person with knowledge of the investigation told me that prosecutors had contacted only the witnesses that they felt were necessary at this stage of the legal process, and had avoided some calls in the interest of preventing leaks.
The decision highlights the unique perils of the Trump indictment, legally and politically. In interviews, several former prosecutors said the decision not to interview Sajudin was risky and wondered why Bragg did not seek information from someone in a position to either support or rebut the evidence being presented. “This was a public investigation for a long time,” Marc Agnifilo, a former prosecutor in Manhattan, said. “So I can’t think of any reason to indict the case without interviewing this person.” A former prosecutor who was involved in the trial of a Trump associate and asked not to be named, warned, “When you are trying one of the most important cases in our lifetime, you want to make sure you know everything about your case so you’re not surprised about anything that may come up at trial.”
Others said that they understood the decision and did not fault it. The intense public interest in the case meant that prosecutors had to go to great lengths to keep their investigation under wraps. Danya Perry, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, told me that prosecutors didn’t need Sajudin’s testimony to meet their burden of proof before the grand jury. Pecker and other witnesses could verify that the payment was made to the doorman. “They have the story now from documents and two witnesses,” Perry said. Whether he fathered a child or had these affairs “is legally irrelevant.”
A.M.I.’s payment to Sajudin was the first of three described by prosecutors. Eight months after paying Sajudin, A.M.I. paid the first of two women, a former Playboy model named Karen McDougal, a hundred and fifty thousand dollars and promised her a number of career opportunities—including magazine covers and a monthly fitness column—in exchange for her silence. Several months later, amid concerns about the cost and the potential legal ramifications of the scheme, A.M.I. referred the second woman—the adult-film actor Stephanie Clifford, who performs as Stormy Daniels—to Cohen, who paid her a hundred and thirty thousand dollars through a shell company. Clifford had, for years, been shopping the story of her sexual liaison with Trump, which she says took place in 2006, shortly after Trump’s wife, Melania, gave birth to their son, Barron.
McDougal, who is named as “woman one” in the indictment documents, did not respond to a request for comment this week. When she spoke with me in 2018 for a New Yorker story and again in 2020 for the podcast, she expressed regret. “Knowing now what’s going on behind the scenes,” McDougal told me, “I feel like I was part of a major coverup in history.”
Prosecutors have charged Trump with thirty-four felony counts of falsifying business records, apparently related to payments reimbursing Cohen after he paid Clifford. Prosecutors will seek to establish that the offenses, which would typically be classified as misdemeanors, were undertaken with the goal of commissioning another crime, allowing them to be charged as felonies. The person with knowledge of Bragg’s investigation noted that prosecutors are not required by law to specify that second crime. “Flexibility and options are key,” that person told me. Prosecutors intend to “save that decision” for when they “feel like it’s most prudent.” In a press conference this week, Bragg referenced multiple potential second crimes, including violations of state and federal election law.
Trump, in his own press conference this week, said that the charges were a politically motivated attempt by Bragg, a Democrat, to prevent him from winning reëlection. “Everybody that has looked at this case, including RINOs and even hardcore Democrats, say there is no crime and that it should never have been brought,” he said. Cohen and Pecker, who are both expected to testify on behalf of the prosecution, did not respond to requests for comment.
Sajudin, now in his fifties, sports a goatee and slicked-back hair. He grew up in Brooklyn in a large Italian American family. Sajudin told me that he spent his youth working in construction and asbestos abatement, witnessing mob associates pay off building inspectors. In 2008, he began working as a doorman at Trump Tower. “Whenever Trump would come to the building, he would quite often give everybody a hundred-dollar bill,” he recalled in the 2019 interview. On the other hand, he said, “It’s like a corporate mob, so to speak.” He added, “They’ll try to be nice to you in the beginning, to try and get what they want. And then, if that doesn’t work, they try to strong-arm you.”
At Trump Tower, Sajudin clashed with a woman who worked as the building’s concierge and who had previously been Trump’s housekeeper. Sajudin recalled her making lavish purchases that seemed incongruous with her income and said that she enjoyed impunity from the building���s management. “Every time she had an argument with somebody, the first words to come out of her mouth is, ‘I will call Mr. Trump. I will call Mr Trump,’ ” Sajudin told me. He said that he raised the matter with superiors, including Matthew Calamari, Trump’s longtime bodyguard, who’d risen through the ranks of the Trump Organization to become its C.O.O. Calamari, he said, “got really loud and rude and told me, he says, ‘You know, you need to, like, let it go.’ He says, ‘If you had Trump’s kid, you could do whatever you want.’ ” The next time Trump arrived at the building, Sajudin said, he received an unusually large tip from Calamari. “Several hundred bucks,” Sajudin recalled. “I assumed he was being so nice to me because he wanted me to be quiet.”
When Sajudin, agitated by his disputes with the concierge, continued to press the subject, he said that Calamari called him into a second meeting, in a dim office with the blinds drawn. Sajudin recalled that Calamari told him, “We think of you like family. We work together. But you need to let this situation go.” Calamari then shook his hand and asked, “Are we clear?” “He wouldn’t let go of my hand,” Sajudin added. “It was like a movie. You know, it was like watching ‘Goodfellas.’ ” (Calamari has declined repeated requests for comment.)
After his encounter with Calamari, Sajudin felt that his standing in the Trump Organization deteriorated. “I definitely feel I was blacklisted,” Sajudin told me. “They probably don’t want a person with this information working in a building in Manhattan.” Sajudin eventually departed the organization—he said by mutual agreement. As he sought another job, it occurred to him that he could monetize the rumor. He contacted Globe, and then the Enquirer. A reporter from the Enquirer responded quickly, offering him six figures, which was later reduced substantially when Sajudin said that he didn’t want his name attached.
In the fall of 2015, Sajudin found himself in a hotel room in rural Pennsylvania, taking a polygraph test for the Enquirer, which he passed. He signed an initial agreement with the tabloid to grant it exclusive rights to the story. Soon after, during a meeting with an Enquirer reporter at a nearby fast-food restaurant, he also signed a revised contract, which included a more robust nondisclosure clause. “If I did speak on the story, I could be subject to a million-dollar fine,” he said.
A.M.I. employees were divided as to the truth of the underlying rumor. Some questioned Sajudin’s credibility. In 2014, a Web site registered through a service that obscures the identity of the author claimed that Sajudin had made similar accusations against a Trump Tower resident. Sajudin told me that he continued to believe the Trump paternity rumor and defended his credibility. “When I tell you it’s the truth, it is the truth,” he said. “No one would risk all this to make up stories.”
Eight months after the payment with Sajudin, A.M.I. finalized its deal with McDougal. Several months after that, Michael Cohen paid off Stormy Daniels. Soon after, Trump was elected President.
In April, 2018, F.B.I. agents raided Cohen’s hotel and office, in part to gather information on the A.M.I. scheme, and The New Yorker published my initial reporting on the payment to Sajudin. “Oh, shit,” Keith Davidson, the lawyer who represented both McDougal and Clifford, told me in 2019, describing his reaction to the raid. “Oh, shit, shit, shit.” Cohen was ultimately convicted and sentenced to three years in prison for campaign-finance violations, tax evasion, and lying to Congress. A.M.I. admitted to the scheme, and struck a non-prosecution agreement with federal authorities. Trump was not charged at the time. (Cohen and Davidson did not respond to requests for comment this week.)
During our interviews, McDougal told me that she believed that “catch and kill should be illegal in a lot of situations and positions.” She added, referring to elected officials, “If you’re working for your country, you have to be up front with this stuff.” Sajudin told me that he had been taken aback by the escalating significance of his story. As the trial of the former President proceeds, interest in A.M.I.’s transactions related to Trump will likely intensify. “I thought this was just, like, a tabloid,” Sajudin told me. “Now I see it’s a lot more than that.” ♦