When I met Michael Cohen in New York two years ago, he was a man visibly crushed by what life had done to him. His whole face sagged: he could have defined the word ‘hangdog’, a beagle caught peeing on the Persian rug. We stood outside his apartment building, which was Trump Park Avenue, Trump’s name bearing down on Cohen’s head in gold letters three feet high. We’d already had a long lunch and I was trying to say goodbye but as he spoke about one injustice or humiliation he remembered another, a torrent of self-pity. Everyone had treated Donald Trump’s former lawyer and fixer unfairly: the Feds, Congress, the media, above all his former boss. ‘I go to jail because he gets his pecker pulled by a porn star?’
He was talking about Stormy Daniels. Cohen had given her $130,000 to keep quiet about having sex with Trump at a golf tournament in Utah in 2006. The money was paid six days before the presidential election, so he was charged with making an illegal campaign contribution. Cohen used a loan against his house to get the money, but hadn’t told the bank what it was for, so he was charged with fraud. Back in 2018, he told me that his wife’s signature was on the bank loan and the FBI had said she would go to jail if he didn’t plead guilty to everything. So he became inmate number 86067-054 at Otisville federal prison in upstate New York.
Cohen wrote a memoir at Otisville, Disloyal: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump. Stormy gets two chapters. He writes that both he and Trump ‘figured sleeping with the blonde bombshell porn star of Revenge of the Dildos wouldn’t help in the swing states’. The point of this story, he tells me now on the phone from Manhattan, is that her payment ‘was done at the direction of and for the benefit of Donald Trump’.
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