National Enquirer Paid Trump Doorman To Stay Silent On Rumored Affair With Employee

Donald Trump

More news on the Trump "silencing" front as multiple sources are now reporting that a former doorman for Trump World Tower was apparently paid $30,000 in the late 80s to stay quiet about rumors that Donald Trump had a relationship with a former housekeeper.

The rumors, first reported by Ronan Farrow for The New Yorker, allege the relationship produced a child.

Late in 2015, a former Trump Tower doorman named Dino Sajudin met with a reporter from American Media, Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer, at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania.

A few weeks earlier, Sajudin had signed a contract with A.M.I., agreeing to become a source and to accept thirty thousand dollars for exclusive rights to information he had been told: that Donald Trump, who had launched his Presidential campaign five months earlier, may have fathered a child with a former employee in the late nineteen-eighties.

Sajudin declined to comment for this story. However, six current and former A.M.I. employees, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared legal retaliation by the company, said that Sajudin had told A.M.I. the names of the alleged mistress and child.

The New Yorker says it has no evidence that Trump fathered a child by the woman.

The payment to Sajudin would mark the third payment meant to silence embarrassing information about Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, taking into account allegations from former Playboy model Karen McDougal and porn star Stormy Daniels.

Sajudin says he passed a lie detector test regarding the rumors at the time of the transaction claiming high-level Trump employees, including Trump’s head of security, Matthew Calamari, had shared the story with him.

A.M.I. acknowledged the payment to Sajudin through company-owned sister website Radar Online today.

As the reports have dominated much of today's news, Sajudin issued a statement to CNN today which read:

“Today I awoke to learn that a confidential agreement I had with AMI [The National Enquirer] with regard to a story about President Trump had been leaked to the press. I can confirm that while working at Trump World Tower, I was instructed not to criticize President Trump’s former housekeeper due to a prior relationship she had with President Trump which produced a child.”

While sources at A.M.I. say they didn't have much confidence in the allegations, they found it unusual that the company would write a $30,000 check for a "catch and kill" story.

Once source told The New Yorker, “It’s unheard of to give a guy who calls A.M.I.’s tip line big bucks for information he is passing on secondhand. We didn’t pay thousands of dollars for non-stories, let alone tens of thousands. It was a highly curious and questionable situation.”

All of this is of interest when viewed through the lens of the recent raid of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen's office where FBI agents searched and seized info pertaining to "hush money" payments.

Not so much about the payoff itself by A.M.I., but the attempt to coverup the story in order to help Trump during the election.