The National Enquirer made a habit of paying for juicy Donald Trump stories just so it could shut those stories down and protect his campaign, according to a new report by Ronan Farrow.
American Media Inc., the magazine’s parent company, reportedly gave the ex-doorman of one of Trump’s buildings $30,000 for a story based on a rumor that POTUS had fathered a child with an employee at Trump Tower in NYC.
Per Farrow’s New Yorker report, Dino Sajudin signed a contract with American Media in late 2015, agreeing to become a source and accept $30K for exclusive rights to the information he had been told — that Trump may have fathered a love child in the late ├óΓé¼╦£80s.
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Sources at American Media told Farrow they were skeptical about Sajudin’s claims — even though the former doorman had passed a lie-detector test, during which he claimed that high-level Trump employees, including Trump’s head of security, told him the story.
But Farrow’s six unnamed staffers also admitted that American Media made a collective effort to have the story shut down without a proper investigation. One source revealed what happened after the polygraph came back positive:
“The decision was made at a high level to pay this source those funds and to put this thing to rest without an investigation taking place.”
Sounds like the paper’s usual “catch and kill” effort, like what they did to suppress Karen McDougal from coming forward with her story about her alleged affair with Trump.
As we reported, the former Playboy model says the Enquirer paid her $150,000 for the exclusive rights to her story about the alleged affair. The company says the payment, now under investigation by prosecutors, was for a fitness column that McDougal never wrote.
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After hearing about the New Yorker‘s story on Sajudin, Radar Online, a sister publication to the Enquirer, published a story Wednesday saying editors at the Enquirer believed Sajudin’s story was not true.
But for that same reason, an insider told Farrow that such a big payout to Sajudin was “highly curious” of the paper, explaining:
“It’s unheard of to give a guy who calls [American Media]’s tip line big bucks for information he is passing on secondhand. We didn’t pay thousands of dollars for non-stories, let alone tens of thousands. It was a highly curious and questionable situation.”
Two sources told Farrow they believed that these catch and kill operations had cemented a partnership between Trump and David Pecker, the publisher of American Media.
Claiming that the people close to the President had later introduced Pecker to potential sources of funding for American Media, another source dished:
“Pecker’s not going to take thirty thousand dollars from company funds to shut down a potentially damaging story about his buddy without making sure it got back to him so he could get credit.”
Sounds about right.
Sajudin was reportedly subject to a $1 million penalty if he broke his agreement. He declined to speak with the New Yorker after Farrow told him the publication does not pay its sources.
[Image via WENN.]
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