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. Prosecutors argue that those payments were part of a years-long conspiracy to hide “damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 election.” 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. 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. The practice of purchasing a story in order to suppress it is known in tabloid circles as “catch and kill.” agreed to buy the rights to incriminating stories on behalf of Trump’s campaign and never publish them. The three men formalized a scheme in which Pecker and A.M.I. 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 whole fact that they covered it up is what made this a big story,” Sajudin told me. employees with knowledge of the agreement, was part of a pattern of concealment, orchestrated by Trump and A.M.I., before the election. But the transaction, which I confirmed by interviewing half a dozen A.M.I. The alleged daughter and her mother both declined to comment, and the father of the family told me it wasn’t true. Who would leak this?’ ” The New Yorker has uncovered no evidence that Trump fathered the child. “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’. “You were asking me questions about this-this contract, and this gag clause,” Sajudin told me, recalling the encounter at his door. At a studio in Brooklyn, in 2019, Sajudin recounted his experiences with Trump and 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. The following year, after I wrote a story for The New Yorker about the payment to Sajudin and the role of A.M.I. Sajudin briefly listened to my request for an interview, demanded payment for talking, then shut the door in my face. The agreement imposed a million-dollar penalty on Sajudin if he disclosed the information elsewhere. 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. 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. In the spring of 2018, I knocked on the door of a gray clapboard house in the Poconos, in eastern Pennsylvania.
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