The first week of November 2016, a few days before the presidential elections, the director of the tabloid National Enquirer, Dylan Howard, was in a hurry to open a small safe at his headquarters in New York. “I want to get everything out of the safe,” he told an employee. “And then we need to bring a crusher here.”
news-know-more partner-vertical-tablet-desktop" amp-access="access" amp-access-hide="">
Trump is unique but not so much: “the monkey problem” and other troubles with the justice of former US presidents
Further
He Enquirerfounded in 1926 and specialized in gossip and especially misfortunes of actors and protagonists of reality showshad entered the campaign publishing stories about the alleged illnesses of Hillary Clinton or the relationship of the father of Ted Cruz, then a Republican candidate, with the assassination of JFK using a more than doubtful photo. The main objective of the tabloid was to support Donald Trump, a friend of Howard and, above all, of David Pecker, the CEO of the publishing company of the EnquirerAmerican Media Inc. (AMI), owner of the largest network of “supermarket tabloids,” named for the most common place where they are sold, next to the cash register.
On that day in November 2016, Howard, an Australian in his thirties and turned company grand strategist, was in a hurry to remove and destroy Trump-related documents after a call from the Wall Street Journalwhich I was about to publish an article on how Enquirer had paid a model Playboy so that he would not talk about his extramarital affair with the Republican candidate. On November 4, four days before the elections, the Journal He posted his exclusive. He Enquirer he had already destroyed documents.
These details of Howard’s overwhelm, the safe, shabby and that he later did not know how to close, and the destruction of possible evidence are told by the journalist Ronan Farrow in his 2019 book Catch and Kill, whose title refers to this practice with a long history in the New York tabloids. It is about “catching” (catch) a story about the dirty laundry of someone famous or prominent and “kill” her (kill), that is, not publish that story and at the same time bribe the source so that they do not tell it to other publications with an out-of-court agreement that includes a penalty if they do.
De Weinstein a Trump
Farrow published this book (and made it also in a podcast) because he experienced firsthand how the Enquirer and then the NBC network tried to “kill” the story that he was investigating about the rape and other sexual abuse cases of the producer Harvey Weinstein, who is now in jail for the journalistic work that revealed what had happened for decades.
Despite pressure, threats and even monitoring by an Israeli spy company, Farrow managed to publish his investigation of Weinstein. in it New Yorker (as did Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s in he New York Times), but along the way he also investigated in depth what the Enquirer And thus he ran into the system that the tabloid had set up with Trump and that is now the key to the imputation of the former president.
In 2016, Howard made a list of the dirty laundry that the company’s tabloids had accumulated over decades on Trump in what was called the “kill files” (the files of the stories that had been “killed”), according to Farrow. A former director told the journalist that the Enquirer I had at least 10 ready-to-publish stories that had been put away in a drawer and in some cases came from other outlets. “He National Enquirer it was a tabloid cesspool, where America’s ugliest gossip used to land,” Farrow writes. And there fell at least three other stories that now they have finished with the impeachment of Trump.
The problem for Trump
The three cases cited now by the prosecution of the District Attorney of Manhattan, Alvin Bragg, are the story of Stormy Daniels, a porn actress and reality shows who tried to sell his relationship with Trump, that of Kate McDougal, a model for the magazine Playboy who participated in Trump’s contest and who also wanted to tell another extramarital affair, and the story told by a Trump Tower doorman about a supposed son of the former president with a former employee (the latter is the one that has been most clearly denied by the protagonists). These three people received bribes – between 30,000 and 150,000 dollars – not to tell their stories. He Enquirer He was acting as an intermediary for the then Republican candidate.
The problem for Trump is that he ordered the payments and tried to cover them up through a company that used fictitious names and reimbursed the tabloid or its intermediary, attorney Michael Cohen, according to prosecutor Bragg’s indictment. And, above all, the question is that this happened between 2015 and 2016, in the middle of the electoral campaign, in what can be considered an attempt to hide an illegal donation to himself, fraud and the concealment of data from the Treasury, among others. offenses that are more serious than the forgery of a business document with which he is now charged, according to Bragg’s exposé.
He New Yorkerhe Wall Street Journal and AP managed to report on these cases despite the efforts of the Enquirer to prevent publication with the help of lawyers they shared with Weinstein (in the AP case, they stopped at least one article).
In 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to federal felony aiding an illegal campaign donation, among charges for which he was sentenced to three years in jail. So Pecker, the CEO of the company that publishes the Enquirer, admitted to performing “in concert” with the Trump campaign at least to buy McDougal’s silence. pecker too testified this March in the case on bribery for which the former president is now being prosecuted.
What does the tabloid get
He Enquirer He makes no secret that he pays for information and that he has bribed sources not to talk to competitors even if he doesn’t publish a story, but the work he did for Trump, which included intimidating other media outlets and journalists, by Farrow’s account, was far beyond.
Pecker, who has a decades-long relationship with Trump, profited personally, with trips and invitations to parties at the White House, and also contacts with investors for his company, for example with a French businessman who introduced him to Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman , according to Catch and Kill.
But above all, the “catch and kill” system gave the Enquirer constant power over the occupant of the White House, something Dylan Howard, the director, boasted of.
“Some employees believe that the most significant award was AMI’s blackmail power buildup to Trump,” Farrow writes in his book. “Howard boasted that he turned down offers of television jobs because he felt that his current job, and his ability to hide negative stories about people, gave him more power than any career in traditional journalism.”
