With the indictment decided on Thursday by a court in Manhattan, New York, Donald Trump became the first former US president to face a criminal trial. It is a historic event in its own way, much commented both in the United States and elsewhere. The charges against Trump have not yet been disclosed, but it is known that they concern a case from a few years ago that has suddenly come back to life: the alleged payment of 130 thousand dollars to the porn film actress Stormy Daniels, which Trump allegedly made in 2016 through her former lawyer Michael Cohen to convince the actress not to divulge a sexual relationship she had with him a decade earlier.
Manhattan prosecutors argue that the payment would not have been properly reported under strict rules regarding the spending of political candidates (the payment was made towards the end of the 2016 presidential election campaign).
Stormy Daniels (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, File)
The public story of the case began in 2018, when The Wall Street Journal first split an alleged payment made to the actress, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, in exchange for her silence. The sexual relationship Clifford should have kept quiet about took place in 2006, when Trump was 60 and she was 27: the two allegedly met during a celebrity golf tournament in Nevada. At the time Trump was already well known as an entrepreneur and host of the reality show The Apprentice. According to Clifford, the two allegedly had dinner and sex (which Trump denied) and he promised her that she would get her on her show, which never happened.
In the following years Clifford tried several times to sell the story of his meeting with Trump to various American newspapers and magazines, but his attempts were unsuccessful. In one case the newspaper that wanted to buy Clifford’s story contacted Trump for his side and the whole thing was handled by Cohen, who was then the lawyer for Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, but also a kind of Trump’s personal handyman. Cohen threatened the paper with a lawsuit, and the paper decided to let it go. Clifford, for his part, said he received threats if he spoke of his meeting with Trump.
Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)
In 2015 Trump decided to run for president of the United States and the story of the meeting with Clifford, who continued to say she was willing to tell the story publicly, suddenly acquired greater weight than it had had up to that moment.
The payment of 130,000 dollars to convince Clifford to keep silent about the meeting would have been made in 2016, in the midst of the electoral campaign for the presidential elections, later won by Trump against Hillary Clinton. Also in 2016, Cohen also paid $150,000 to another woman, Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model, who wanted to sell to newspapers the story of her alleged relationship with Trump between 2006 and 2007.
In 2018, when the story of the payment to Clifford became public, Cohen said he paid Clifford at his own expense, without being mandated by Trump and never receiving any reimbursement. Cohen later changed his story and claimed the opposite: that he had paid Clifford on Trump’s orders and that he had reimbursed him. Trump continued to deny, except that he too changed his version a few months later, when he admitted that he had reimbursed Cohen for the payment of the 130,000 dollars.
The reimbursement to Cohen would have been justified as a fee for legal advice, even though the sum Trump paid to Cohen was actually much greater: $360,000 plus a $60,000 bonus, for a total of about $420,000. It is unclear whether all that money was actually paid to Clifford.
Paying someone for a so-called non discosure agreement (a document requiring secrecy) is not in itself illegal: the problem, according to the Manhattan prosecutor’s office which has been investigating the case for years now, is that the payment to Clifford consisted of an unlawful loan declared to the Trump electoral campaign, made by Cohen for the sole benefit of the Trump candidate, which therefore had to be reported in the expenses of his electoral committee. In August 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to this, and explicitly said that Trump had ordered him to make the payments “for the primary purpose of influencing the election.”
Donald Trump (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison, partly spent in jail and partly under house arrest. No charges were filed against Trump until the case was reopened in January 2023 by the new Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg.
Trump was indicted last Thursday. Although it is known that the allegations concern the case of the payment to Stormy Daniels, it is not known what exactly they are. One hypothesis is that Trump is accused of not having correctly reported his payment to hide it, or of having done so to hide a second more serious crime (even at this moment it is not clear which). Trump, meanwhile, is a candidate in the Republican party primaries for the 2024 elections: he claims to be innocent and has called the ongoing investigation a “witch hunt” to damage his political career.
