This is the sort of trashy tale that Donald Trump, then in his pre-presidential existence as real-estate tycoon-cum-sleazebag TV celeb might once upon a time have revelled before characterising it all "FAKE NEWS".
Trump, however, thought the story would cost him votes on the eve of his presidential election in 2016 (he says it is false). So, according to prosecutors, he hatched a plan to pay Stormy Daniels for her silence.
Monday Trump will finally face trial on state charges in New York stemming from the very sex scandal that he and his aides sought to suppress after years of false starts before an indictment last year.
Assuming no last-second holdups, it will be the first of Trump's four criminal cases to go before a jury. It will make history as the only criminal trial of an ex-president in U.S. history.
Yet it was precisely this case that prompted former Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. to investigate the $130,000 payout Cohen made to Daniels and ultimately reluctant to take the politically explosive step of trying to indict Trump.
Such was the district attorney’s office uncertainty about the hush money case that it was derided among prosecutors as the “zombie case”. They would return to it, then reject it again as they continued to harass Trump on multiple angles over the past five years, twice ascending to the Supreme Court to access his tax records and acknowledging the more severe tax charges against his firm and a top executive.
Its successor, Democrat Alvin Bragg, who took office earlier this year, apparently saw the hush money case in another light. The grand jury convened in January 2023 and encountered Cohen, who has since become one of his ex-boss’s fiercest critics, and other witnesses, including David Pecker, the former boss of the National Enquirer tabloid, who collaborated with Trump by buying a few negative narratives and halting them in a practice called “catch-and-kill”.
The grand jury rendered its indictment judgment on March 30, 2023. The accusation is that Trump falsified the internal records of his firm to disguise the reality that he made payments to Cohen to reimburse him for his compensation by suppressing possibly humiliating narratives.
Ultimately, the charges will be felonies carrying a four-year prison term , although conviction does not always mean incarceration Trump repudiates. He describes a “election interference” and a “witch hunt” conducted by the prosecutors.