Catch and Kill

by Ronan Farrow

  CHAPTER 51:

  CHUPACABRA

  By the time we published, I’d already heard about another transaction that might show that McDougal’s contract was part of a pattern of AMI working to suppress stories for Trump. Friends and colleagues of Dylan Howard contacted me to say that Howard had boasted that he had evidence that Trump may have fathered a child with his former housekeeper in the late 1980s. Howard “would sometimes say things when drunk or high. Including telling me they would pay for stories and not publish, to protect people,” one of the friends told me. “You don’t forget when someone says, ‘Oh, by the way. The maybe-future president has a love child.’”

  In February 2018, I sat down in David Remnick’s office and told him about the story. “You know what people are going to say when they find out you’re reporting this?” he said, wonderingly. We both laughed. I knew my way around a paternity rumor.

  There was no evidence that the underlying rumor about the “love child” was true. But that spring, a growing number of documents and sources made clear that AMI really had bought the rights to the dubious claim, then worked to prevent its disclosure.

  In late 2015, Dino Sajudin, a former Trump Tower doorman, had told AMI the story, along with the names of the supposed mother and child. For weeks, National Enquirer reporters pursued the matter. The tabloid retained two private investigators: Danno Hanks, who ran record searches on the family, and Michael Mancuso, a former criminal investigator, who administered a lie-detector test to Sajudin. Several of the reporters doubted Sajudin’s credibility. (His ex-wife would later call him a fabulist. “He’s seen the chupacabra,” she said. “He’s seen bigfoot.”) But the former doorman passed the polygraph, testifying that high-level Trump employees, including Trump’s head of security, Matthew Calamari, had told him the story.

  Then, David Pecker abruptly ordered the reporters to stop. In November 2015, Sajudin signed an agreement to accept $30,000 for the exclusive rights to the information. Soon after, he met with an AMI reporter at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania and signed a further amendment, adding a $1,000,000 penalty if the ex-doorman ever disclosed the information without AMI’s permission. The reporter told Sajudin he’d get his money. Sajudin, seeming pleased, said it was going to be “a very merry Christmas.”

  As he later did during the McDougal affair, Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal attorney, had monitored the unfolding events closely. “There’s no question it was done as a favor to continue to protect Trump,” one former AMI employee told me. “That’s black-and-white.”

  Later, when journalists sought to report on the rumor, the Enquirer worked to thwart them. In the summer of 2017, two reporters at the Associated Press, Jeff Horwitz and Jake Pearson, had reported out and filed a detailed story. As they neared publication, Howard assembled a muscular legal team and threatened to sue the AP. In July, at AMI’s urging, Sally Buzbee, AP’s executive editor, and her general counsel met with Howard and his team. He’d hired Weinstein’s representatives: the lawyers of Boies Schiller and Lanny Davis.

  The following month, Buzbee announced internally that the story wouldn’t run after all. “After robust internal discussion, AP news leaders determined that the story at the time did not meet AP’s rigorous sourcing requirements,” Buzbee later said, defending the decision. Several other AP journalists felt the sourcing was robust and expressed shock at the decision. Horwitz left work for days and had to be persuaded by his bosses to return. For almost a year after, the story stayed dead.

  But the next spring, that was changing. Enquirer sources were beginning to talk. By early March 2018, one was close to sharing a copy of the amendment Sajudin had signed in late 2015. The source and I met at a rundown Middle Eastern restaurant in Los Angeles, where I spent hours arguing the merits of sharing the document. That night, I headed back to Jonathan’s place in West Hollywood, with a printed copy in hand.

  “When did you realize—” Jonathan said theatrically when I walked in, late.

  “—I know, I know, that I hate you,” I said. We’d done this before.

  “We were gonna have dinner,” he said.

  “Sorry. Ran long.”

  “You ran long yesterday,” he said, and we proceeded to fight about this. I wondered how long we could keep going like this, with me absent and consumed and stressed out. Later, with Jonathan bundled off to bed, I stepped out to meet a delivery guy. Directly across the street, a pale thirty-something-year-old man with dark, stringy hair and stubble was standing next to a car, staring. I was beginning to feel that nagging, watched feeling again.

  Having dealt with a lifetime of my own curiosity from the press, I didn’t want to be intrusive. But in order to respect the wishes of the people involved in the rumor, I had to find out if they wanted to say anything. In mid-March, I knocked on Sajudin’s door in the woods in rural Pennsylvania. “I don’t talk for free,” he said, then slammed the door in my face. Emails and calls to the alleged love child—who was now, of course, no longer a child at all—got no response. Late that month, I searched California’s Bay Area, trying recently listed addresses. I found only one family member, who said, “I’m not supposed to talk to you.” I tried a work address, too. The rumored love child was employed at (seriously) a genetic testing company.

  Finally, I tried the family’s home in Queens. It was small and faded, with clapboard siding. In a square of grass outside was a little shrine with a plaster Madonna. I stopped by a few times before encountering a middle-aged man I recognized as the husband of the woman who’d allegedly had the affair. He held up his hands as I approached. “She’s not gonna talk to you or nobody,” he said. He had a straight, uncomplicated inflection and a Latin American accent. He was convinced the rumor was untrue. The Enquirer’s transaction had put the family in a difficult situation. “I don’t understand what they had to pay this guy for,” he said. “I’m the dad.”

  “Got it,” I said, and gave him a condoling look. I told him I was making sure they had the chance to respond if they wanted to. I said I understood how awful it could feel to have the press circling your family.

  He nodded. “I understand. You’re Farrow.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh I know.”

  And then he was the one with the pitying look.

  By early April, we’d backed up the story with the accounts of six current and former AMI employees, texts and emails from the time at which AMI struck the deal, and the amendment Sajudin had signed at the McDonald’s. As it had with McDougal, the White House denied the affair, and added, “I’d refer you to AMI,” which was one way to respond to a story documenting legally questionable collaboration with the company in question.

  Sean Lavery, the boyish Midwesterner assigned to fact-check the story, sent a detailed memo to Howard. Less than thirty minutes later, Radar Online, an AMI website, put out a post acknowledging everything. “Ronan Farrow from The New Yorker,” it read, “is calling our staff, and seems to think this is another example of how The ENQUIRER, by supposedly… killing stories about President Trump is a threat to national security.”

  Minutes later Howard was emailing. As he had with McDougal, he pled pure journalistic motivation and denied any collaboration with Trump. “You’re about to sh*t all over the institution that is The New Yorker,” he wrote to Remnick. “Ronan’s unhealthy obsession with our publication (and me—perhaps it’s my smile?) puts you at peril.” He added, of me: “he’s about to make for terrific Enquirer fodder.” (Dylan Howard used a lot of italics.)

  With Howard’s confessional Radar Online post out in the wild, the AP raced to revive its efforts. The AP went live with its resurrected draft, and we published our story at The New Yorker, overnight.

  Not all of AMI’s efforts on Trump’s behalf panned out. I’d later learn of one other case in which the company looked into a matter in close concert with Trump’s associates. In early 2016, an anonymous woman—“Katie Johnson” in an initial legal document, “Jane Doe” in a subsequent one—f
iled a lawsuit against Trump. The plaintiff claimed that, in 1994, when she was thirteen years old and newly arrived in New York City to pursue modeling work, she’d been offered money to attend parties hosted by Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire investor, and attended by Trump. Hair-curling allegations of sexual violence followed: the lawsuit contended that the plaintiff and other minors were forced to perform sex acts on Trump and Epstein, culminating in a “savage sexual attack” by Trump; that Trump had threatened the plaintiff and her family with physical harm should she ever speak; and that both Trump and Epstein were told that the girls involved were underage.

  There was truth in the general context: Epstein was close friends with Donald Trump. “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump told a reporter in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it—Jeffrey enjoys his social life.” Miami Herald writer Julie K. Brown later published powerful reporting on widespread allegations that Epstein sexually abused minors. In 2019, federal agents arrested him on sex trafficking charges, unraveling a plea deal that had shielded the investor. The lenient agreement had been brokered by Alexander Acosta, a secretary of labor in Trump’s cabinet, when he was a prosecutor. He later resigned over the matter. Soon after, Epstein was found dead in jail, hanged in an apparent suicide.

  But, as had been the case with Sajudin’s claims about the love child, the anonymous rape allegation wasn’t backed by convincing evidence. The initial suit, filed in California, was dismissed on procedural grounds, re-filed in New York, then dropped yet again. Norm Lubow, a former producer on The Jerry Springer Show and pusher of several dubious celebrity scandals, helped orchestrate the lawsuit and acted as the plaintiff’s intermediary in the press. The plaintiff herself was difficult to reach. One attorney who represented her told me even he sometimes had trouble finding her. Few reporters ever made contact with her. One, Emily Shugerman, said that the woman’s lawyer canceled a planned Skype or FaceTime interview several times, then replaced it with a brief phone call. Shugerman emerged as doubtful as most journalists about the story and the elusive woman at the heart of it. Possibly she was being threatened into retreat. Or possibly she was an invention of the checkered figures around her.

  But one additional curiosity was never made public. According to several AMI employees and one senior associate of Trump’s, Pecker, who was at the time in close contact with Trump, learned of the lawsuit shortly after it was filed. After that, Howard was on the phone with Cohen, Trump’s personal attorney, assuring him that they would track down the woman with the rape allegation and see what they could do about her. “Dylan was on the phone with Cohen at all hours” about it, one of the AMI employees recalled. “It became a top priority.” With Cohen monitoring the situation, Howard dispatched an AMI reporter to an address associated with one of the initial court filings. But the reporter found only a foreclosed home in the sleepy desert community of Twentynine Palms, California. A neighbor said that no one had been there since the previous fall.

  There was no opportunity to buy this story. Nevertheless, in the early days after the anonymous suit, when few media outlets were touching it, AMI ran several stories shooting down the claims in the lawsuit. One of the company’s headlines on the suit quoted Trump calling it “disgusting”; another went with “bogus.”

  In late 2016, the anonymous woman with the rape allegation resurfaced with new legal representation. Her new attorney was a professed defender of women, whom Howard would later describe as a “long-time friend”: Lisa Bloom. After he learned that Bloom was working on the case, Howard contacted the attorney to warn her away from it. Eventually, Bloom announced a last-minute cancelation of a planned press conference with the plaintiff and withdrew the suit for the final time.

  Other outlets were reporting stories that reinforced the idea of a pact between Trump and AMI, too. From early in the reporting on McDougal, I’d heard rumors that the porn actress Stormy Daniels had signed a nondisclosure agreement barring her from talking about a sexual encounter she claimed to have had with Trump. Two months after I started talking to McDougal, the Wall Street Journal reported that Daniels had indeed signed such a contract, arranged directly through Michael Cohen. Not included in the Journal’s report was the fact that Daniels’s lawyer, Keith Davidson, who had previously represented McDougal, had called Dylan Howard about the story first. Howard told Davidson that AMI was passing on the Daniels matter. Pecker had just extended himself for Trump, and was growing antsy about the potential for fallout. But Howard directed Davidson to Michael Cohen, who established a shell company to pay Daniels $130,000 in exchange for her silence. The contract used pseudonyms: Daniels was “Peggy Peterson” and Trump, “David Dennison.”

  “You know who’s really been fucked?” Davidson later told me. “David Dennison. Who was on my high school hockey team. And he is pissed.”

  The stories AMI bought and buried during the election, like Sajudin’s and McDougal’s, along with the ones on which they engaged with Cohen more preliminarily, like those of Daniels and the anonymous accuser, raised thorny legal and political questions. Trump hadn’t included any of the payments on his financial disclosure forms during the election. As we released our reporting, a nonprofit watchdog organization and a left-leaning political group filed formal complaints requesting that the Justice Department, the Office of Government Ethics, and the Federal Election Commission examine whether the payments to Daniels and McDougal violated federal election law.

  Legal experts said they might have. The timing, during the election, was good circumstantial evidence that AMI’s intent had been to help the campaign; the conversations with Cohen even more so. Media companies have various exemptions from campaign finance law. But that might not apply, the legal experts added, were it established that a media company was acting not in its press capacity but as an extension of a powerful person’s public relations effort.

  All of the AMI employees I spoke with said that the alliance with Trump had distorted the place and its business model. “We never printed a word about Trump without his approval,” said Jerry George, the former AMI senior editor. Several of the employees told me that Pecker had reaped tangible benefits. They said that people close to Trump had introduced Pecker to potential sources of funding for AMI. In the summer of 2017, Pecker visited the Oval Office and dined at the White House with a French businessman known for brokering deals with Saudi Arabia. Two months later, the businessman and Pecker met with the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.

  Some of the employees felt that the most significant reward was AMI’s steadily accumulating blackmail power over Trump. Howard bragged to friends that he was turning down television job offers because he felt his current position, and his ability to hold negative stories over people, gave him more power than any career in traditional journalism. “In theory, you would think that Trump has all the power in that relationship,” Maxine Page, the AMI veteran, told me, “but in fact Pecker has the power—he has the power to run these stories. He knows where the bodies are buried.” The concern had run through the conversations with McDougal, too. “Someone in a high position that controls our country, if they can influence him,” she said of Trump, “it’s a big deal.”

  The relationship between AMI and Trump was an extreme example of the media’s potential to slip from independent oversight to cocktail party alliances with reporting subjects. But, for AMI, it was also familiar territory. Over the years, the company had reached deals to shelve reporting around Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Tiger Woods, Mark Wahlberg, and too many others to count. “We had stories and we bought them knowing full well they were never going to run,” George said.

  One after another, the AMI employees used the same phrase to describe this practice of purchasing a story in order to bury it. It was an old term in the tabloid industry: “catch and kill.”

  CHAPTER 52:


  CIRCLE

  Dylan Howard had a vindictive streak, ten people who worked with him told me. Former employees would later tell the Associated Press that he “openly described his sexual partners in the newsroom, discussed female employees’ sex lives and forced women to watch or listen to pornographic material.” In 2012, in response to complaints from female colleagues, AMI launched an internal inquiry, led by an outside consultant. The company maintained that the report found no “serious” wrongdoing. Its general counsel confirmed that women had lodged complaints about Howard, including one that he’d offered to create a Facebook page for a colleague’s vagina. Maxine Page, the AMI veteran, said she complained on behalf of multiple other women. Liz Crokin, another former reporter, said that after she told the outside consultant investigating the matter that Howard harassed her, she believed Howard retaliated against her, assigning her menial tasks and withholding substantive ones. Howard later denied all allegations of misconduct and a spokesperson said the women were “disgruntled.”

  After my stories, several of Howard’s colleagues said he appeared to be enraged. Two recalled him saying that he was going to “get” me. One warned him that this was silly, that the retaliation would be too transparent. Howard was undeterred.

  For a brief, shining moment, I was an all-caps, sans serif, recurring villain in the pages of the National Enquirer. A few days after the doorman story broke, a first comment request arrived, about the uncle I couldn’t recall having met, whom Weinstein had brought up in his legal threat letters: “The National Enquirer intends to publish a story reporting Ronan Farrow’s uncle John Charles Villiers-Farrow was convicted of sexually abusing two 10-year-old boys.” Shortly after that, intermediaries began sending messages aggressively soliciting “dick pics.” When I failed to send any, the Enquirer published a complaint that I’d refused. When I responded with anything that seemed flirtatious or frank, Howard ran that, too. Howard and his colleagues reached out for comment about fabricated yarns, including one implicating me and another journalist, who’d worked on a prominent story critical of AMI, in some sort of Brazilian sex romp. (If only my life were so exciting.)