Disloyal: A Memoir

by Michael Cohen

  If something didn’t work out for Trump to his satisfaction, he dropped the whole project instantaneously, or at least after he’d wallowed in his outrage and anger. The same went for people. Or debts. Or promises. So I wasn’t truly shocked when, a week later, I walked into Trump’s office and dropped John Gauger’s invoice for the work he’d done on the poll on his desk. The services rendered included purchasing the IP addresses and payment for the time spent by Gauger and his team to cheat on Trump’s behalf. I’d written at the bottom of the invoice “Approved,” hoping that Trump would just initial the document and I could close out the entire fiasco.

  “Leave it,” Trump said, appraising the invoice but not signing it. “We’ll deal with it later.”

  “No worries,” I said.

  Walking back to my office, I had the sinking feeling that getting payment was going to be difficult, and that’s exactly how it played out. Somehow, I deduced, in Trump’s mind the poll hadn’t yielded the desired result, and so he’d convinced himself that he shouldn’t be burdened by having to pay for Gauger’s services. That was precisely what Trump said when I raised the question with him a few days later. He complained that he didn’t get credit for his #9 ranking, so why should he have to pay?

  Knowing Trump as well as I did, I knew he wasn’t going to pay up—and he knew that I knew. That was how things worked with Trump. Many, many things—really most things—were unspoken, especially if he was doing something dishonest or unethical. I wasn’t going to confront him and explain how John had done all that he’d promised, or point out that I had taken a big risk on Trump’s behalf by cheating and getting John to participate, or that John was a friend and someone I relied upon for web- and tech-related advice and I didn’t want to burn that bridge. No one spoke the truth to Trump, and I’m sure that is the case now that he’s turned the White House into the mirror image of his office in the Trump Tower, with yes men like me doing his bidding and never, ever, ever confronting him with reality.

  After failing miserably with Trump, I then tried to convince CFO Allen Weisselberg to pay the invoice, but he refused. He and Trump were like Frick and Frack when it came to stiffing vendors, so I knew that had little chance of actually working. In the end, Trump said he didn’t want to pay the invoice because it would create a paper trail to prove that he had cheated in the CNBC poll. But he conceded that he would pay Gauger eventually, when enough time had passed to distance himself from the poll and make it difficult for any enterprising reporter or tax auditor to connect the payment to the questionable campaign to cheat. I told Gauger that he’d get paid someday, without saying when, and he agreed to keep the invoice as an open receivable, which enabled me to keep using him over the years, including during the madness of the election in 2016, when I truly got swept up in the tornado that was the Trump Campaign.

  But first I had another catch and kill operation to run, not for Mr. Trump but for my dear friends, more like family to me, the Falwells—and, like the Bieber favor a few years earlier, this would have a huge impact on the 2016 election, evangelicals, the Supreme Court, and the fate of the nation. This situation began with a phone call, as so many did for me as a fixer, from Jerry Falwell Jr., telling me a story that stretched back years to a visit he and his wife had taken to Miami. They’d stayed at the five-star Fontainebleau Hotel and soaking up the sun the pair had become friendly with a kid working at the pool. Jerry called him a pool boy. He said they’d stayed in touch with the pool boy and talked about helping him finance a business with an investment in real estate. Jerry didn’t fill me in on all the details, only that a deal was never consummated and the relationship ended with hard feelings. The kid had filed a lawsuit, Jerry said, but that wasn’t why he’d called me, as I knew. I wasn’t the lawyer you called to help with litigation; I was the lawyer you called when you had a problem that needed to be solved—or made to go away.

  By this time, I knew it had to be serious. The simple act of calling me to ask a favor was in itself like using up the favor, because he knew that if he asked me to do something for him I would move heaven and earth to help. Since the laying of hands ceremony in 2011, I’d stayed in steady contact with the Falwells, meeting them for dinner when they were in New York. I knew their children and shared in family news, as a close friend, much closer than Trump ever was to two of the most powerful evangelicals in the nation.

  “This is personal,” Jerry said.

  “I will do everything I can for you,” I vowed, and I meant it.

  Jerry continued in a sheepish voice that somehow the pool boy had come into possession of photographs he’d taken on his phone. He said the photos weren’t pornographic, or anything like that, but they were embarrassing. He said that he and his wife Becki had purchased a new tractor for their farm and Mrs. Falwell had started to pose for portraits as she climbed on to the hood of the tractor. One thing lead to another, Jerry said, now speaking like a man who knows he did something stupid that he regrets but he had to just own up to it and get it out. Becki had started to pose for photos with her top open a little bit, and then a lot, and then the top came off, then the bra, and soon she was vamping like a softcore MILF.

  Pausing, as if to say, I know, I know, Jerry said that the terrible thing was that the pool boy was now threatening to shop the photographs to publications as a way to pressure the Falwells to settle the lawsuit on favorable terms. They had no idea how he’d managed to get the photos, Jerry said, although he had to have figured out a way to get into his phone, I surmised. The problem was that the Falwells had multiple children, which would make the release of the images mortifying, but their livelihoods also centered around their religious beliefs and reputations. If Becki Falwell was seen half-naked by the students of Liberty University, let alone evangelicals all over the country, it would be an unmitigated disaster. Catch and kill, I thought, but in this case it was just going to be kill.

  “Send me a copy of all the pleadings and the contact information for this young man,” I said. “I won’t call the pool boy, I’ll talk to his lawyer.”

  “Becki is beside herself,” Jerry said. “She’s afraid these images will be all over the Internet.

  “Relax,” I said. “Please tell Becki that I’m on it. This is personal to me as well. I will call you no later than tonight.”

  The lawyer’s name and contact information were in the pleadings online, so I called immediately. I asked if he was still representing the pool boy and he said he was. I laid out the details of the situation, in outline, including the conversations between the parties when the pool boy had menaced the Falwells, saying he’d release the raunchy pictures of Mrs. Falwell.

  Before the lawyer could speak, I went for the jugular.

  “You are aware that his actions are tantamount to extortion,” I said. “I am going to ask you to contact him right now, ask him where the photos are, and if they are in his possession, he needs to turn them over to me and give me the names and contact information of anyone and everyone else who he showed the photographs to. I also need to know if he made any copies.

  “Go now and do this,” I continued, “and call me right back. If I don’t hear from you by three o’clock this afternoon I will instruct the Falwells to contact the FBI and file a complaint.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” the lawyer replied. “I’ll call you right after I speak to him.”

  I called Becki and reassured her that the pictures wouldn’t get out, but I could hear the sadness and fear in her voice. I reassured her that I wouldn’t let her down, and I didn’t. When the lawyer called me back, he told me he’d spoken with his client and he was sure that the matter would end there. I repeated that his client would face serious criminal charges if the pictures surfaced.

  “That won’t happen,” the lawyer said.

  “If by chance they do,” I said, “I will use every resource at my disposal to see that he goes to prison.”

  “
I assure you we will not be speaking again on this matter,” the lawyer said.

  There it was: my second chit with the Falwells. In good time, I would call in this favor, not for me, but for the Boss, at a crucial moment on his journey to the Presidency.

  Chapter Eleven

  Trump For President (Part Two)

  After nearly a decade, in 2014, I started planning to leave the Trump Organization. The idea was to start a real estate hedge fund, running money with and for Mark Cuban and his family, along with my own stockpile of funds. I wasn’t quite a centimillionaire on paper, but I was closing in on that number with my taxi medallions and real estate holdings, and I felt confident that I was going to continue to succeed as a businessman in my own right.

  Besides, the Trump Organization was increasingly becoming a sleepy backwater, at least relatively speaking compared to other NYC developers. Celebrity Apprentice wasn’t on the air anymore, after slowly dying with falling ratings and increasingly idiotic story lines and obscure C-level contestants, denying the Boss the revenue stream he’d long relied on. This, in turn, slowed down his now-dwindling business interests. I worked on an attempt to buy the Buffalo Bills of the NFL for $1 billion, which failed when Trump couldn’t arrange financing—no banks were willing to loan him that kind of money with his long history of defaulting and declaring bankruptcy.

  The only bank that would still deal with Trump was Deutsche Bank, the German financial institution with a reputation for playing fast and loose with the rules and laws, but the bank was upset at the way Trump used incredibly inflated valuations of his real estate holdings to justify his company’s loans. A mansion in Westchester that he had purchased for $7M was given a value of $291M, to cite but one example (ironically, it was the very house a famous Wall Street Ponzi schemer named Sam Israel had rented from Mr. Trump as he ran his scam in the 2000s). Reducing Trump’s hyped estimates by seventy percent, he could no longer command large lines of credit or the financing to play with the big boys.

  In truth, I was also fed up with the taunting and teasing he incessantly inflicted on me. He didn’t like that I was forming my own relationships with business icons like Mark Cuban and Carl Icahn. Trump didn’t like that I was starting to run in the same social circles, and he’d let me know by way of putdowns and sarcastic remarks about my new Rolls Royce or the vacations I took at exclusive resorts. When I spent a few days on Steve Wynn’s yacht, Trump took it as an affront, as if I were somehow diminishing his status by consorting with people he viewed as peers. He thought I was getting uppity, it seemed to me: I was always his personal attorney, a lackey, someone who did his bidding. As I’ve said, in the world of Donald Trump, success was a zero-sum game, and anyone who had the temerity to make money and get ahead in life, without bowing and scraping to the Boss, had to be kept in their place.

  In effect, Trump was slowly becoming just another crotchety semi-retired rich dude who’d inherited a ton of money and spent decades playing with his family’s fortune, ending up as the owner of a few buildings in Manhattan, a few golf courses in America, Ireland, and Scotland, and a reputation as a conspiracy-peddling celebrity and political wannabe. He had substantial holdings, without doubt, but he was hardly the world-beating billionaire he liked to portray himself to be, and I honestly thought I could do better with bigger players with deeper pockets and far less agitation.

  By this time, my daughter Samantha was beyond desperate for me to quit working for Trump. She was tired of the entire Trump clan and all the intrigue that surrounded them. Ivanka shunned her in the lobby of Trump Park Avenue, a petty slight signifying that Trump’s daughter believed the Cohen family was beneath her social stature. In this way, in the constant measure of status and snobbery, the Trumps were actually tiresome and conceited bores—something you’d never hear said about that family, but it was true.

  “Did you quit today?” Samantha asked me on a daily basis, repeating herself for emphasis. “Did you quit today? Did you quit today?”

  Samantha didn’t like the Trumps and their incessant competitiveness and egomania, but she had become close friends with Tiffany before I even began working for Trump and at the University of Pennsylvania, where they both studied, though she’d been amazed and appalled at how Tiffany’s father treated the only daughter he’d had with Marla Maples. I also really felt for Tiffany and the way she was treated. The pecking order of the kids was painfully apparent. Trump was very specific about his views on the importance of female beauty in measuring the value of women, including inside his own family. When he wanted a particular businessman to do his biddings, he would often have me send Ivanka to take the meeting with a married man who the Boss figured would be susceptible to her charms.

  “They can’t think straight when they’re around her,” Trump told me of deploying his elder daughter to deploy her looks with lustful men twice her age. “They can’t keep their eyes off her.”

  But the beauty myth cut both ways in the Trump family, I knew. His daughter Tiffany was referred to as the “red-haired stepchild” by the other Trump kids, just one of a million ways she was treated differently than her siblings. The casual cruelty included Ivanka, who jealously guarded her position as Trump’s favorite and surrogate, even at the expense of her vulnerable younger sister, as I saw firsthand. After graduating from college, Tiffany asked her father to call Anna Wintour, the editorial director of Condé Nast, to arrange for her to get an internship with Vogue magazine. I was in Trump’s office with Ivanka one day as he mused over the idea of supporting Tiffany pursuing a career in fashion.

  “I don’t think Tiffany has the look,” Trump said to Ivanka and me. “She just doesn’t have what you have, honey.”

  “I agree, Daddy,” Ivanka said. That was how they referred to each other: Daddy and honey. “She just doesn’t have the look is the right way to say it, Daddy.”

  Contrary to public perception, and in contradiction to his impossibly broad but secret roles in the administration, Trump didn’t particularly like Jared Kushner, either. I don’t say that from a place of envy, as might seem obvious, with the thin and callow scion seeming to bestride the globe like a colossus while I paint the walls in a prison camp in the Catskills—yes, I am aware of appearances—but really as a simple observation. The reason Trump leans on Kushner so heavily is that there’s no one else he can trust, to his way of thinking, to run the back channels and side deals that the Boss deems essential to any endeavor; present or future. Jared will do as he’s told, with discretion, in a way that Trump can’t find in other advisors. If you doubt my word, just look at what happened when the maniac Rudy Giuliani started to freelance foreign policy in Ukraine. There were two Rudys—one batshit crazy and one clear-headed—and if you wanted to get anything sensible out of him it was like rolling the dice. By that measure, Jared Kushner was Dag Hammarskjold incarnate.

  So, by the end of 2014, only one thing was holding me back from quitting the Trump Organization: the tantalizing possibility that the Boss would run for President in 2016. After chickening out in 2012, afraid of staring down Barack Obama, I knew in my gut that Trump would enter the race for this cycle. He kept a running commentary on the Republican candidates as they declared they were running, holding them all in contempt, and always bragging how he could whip them with one hand tied behind his back, and I actually agreed with him. Jeb Bush was a favorite whipping boy, with his only real claim to the office being his last name, and Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz wouldn’t have a prayer in the public arena against the blast furnace of Trump’s rhetoric. On and on Trump sniped at the dwarves holding solemn press conferences and affecting the manner of men who the public could imagine in the highest office in the land.

  So I worked on Trump about running for President. I didn’t nag him, but I didn’t let him forget that I was hoping he’d run. Finally, the day after New Year’s in 2015, I requested a sit-down meeting with Trump to discuss the Presidency. Trump was in a good mood that da
y, which was a good sign, so I cut to the chase.

  “Are we doing it?”

  I didn’t have to say what “it” was; we were like an old couple completing each other’s sentences.

  “Yes,” Trump said.

  I didn’t ask for any further confirmation, or engage in any discussions or speculation. Not wanting to push my luck, I immediately went to my office and began working the phones. This was as close as I will ever come to the rush the conductor of an orchestra must experience as they wave their baton and the strings and wind instruments and percussion all rise in unison to become a symphony. My instruments were two cell phones and two land phones, each with five lines, as I spread the word with my press contacts that the Boss was going to run—for real this time.

  My first stop was Maggie Haberman at The New York Times. I’d known her a long time, and I knew that no publication mattered more to Trump than the Times, no matter what he said to the contrary. He cared more about what the Times said than the opinion of his wife or children. Next, I called David Pecker at the National Enquirer, my go-to bullshit artist. Then came Sean Hannity at Fox, contacts at CNN, MSNBC, CBS, George Stephanopoulos at ABC, Emily Jane Fox at Vanity Fair; my contacts list was extensive, not least because the address books in my phones were synced to Trump’s—that’s how connected we were, like Siamese twins. Think about the fact that our phone address lists were identical: do you do that with your spouse, or children, or anyone?