Michael Cohen — the most pivotal witness in the Manhattan district attorney’s historic criminal case against Donald Trump — testified Monday about the hush money deals he said he helped arrange at the direction of his former boss in order to benefit his 2016 presidential campaign — including burying what he feared would be one woman’s “catastrophic” allegation if it ever became public.
Trump, Cohen said, desperately wanted to silence porn actress Stormy Daniels, whose claims of a 2006 sexual encounter the then-presidential candidate feared would be a “total disaster” for his campaign. “Women are going to hate me” if her story becomes public, Cohen quoted Trump as telling him.
In the witness box, Cohen was seated about 10 feet from Trump, whom he has repeatedly mocked on social media and in interviews, including since the start of the trial. Trump is not directly in Cohen’s line of sight — he had to stand up and lean over to when asked to point Trump out to the jury.
Cohen began his testimony by recounting his legal career, and when he was hired by Trump in 2007. “It was all very exciting to me,” Cohen said. He made $525,000 in his first year. Asked who he reported to, he said, “Just Mr. Trump.” Cohen said they would speak “every single day, and multiple times a day.”
Cohen also said he encouraged Trump to run for president and was excited when he did so. But the man he called “boss” had a concern.
“You know that when this comes out — meaning the announcement — just be prepared. There’s going to be a lot of women coming forward,” Cohen said Trump told him.
To address those concerns, he and Trump met with the National Enquirer publisher David Pecker at Trump Tower in 2015, asking him to place positive stories about Trump and negative stories about his rivals, and to alert them to any potentially scandalous stories.
Pecker made good on his promise soon after, alerting Cohen about a doorman who was peddling a story about Trump having a love child. Pecker testified earlier in the trial that the tale turned out to be false. Cohen said he reported what the doorman was claiming to Trump, who “told me to make sure that this story doesn’t get out.”
“You handle it,” he said Trump told him.
The Enquirer purchased the doorman’s story for $30,000 with no intention of running it in a deal that Cohen said he tweaked to add financial penalties for the doorman if he spoke to any other outlet.
Pecker also alerted him to another story in June of 2016: A Playboy model named Karen McDougal was claiming she had an affair with Trump in 2006. Cohen said he talked to Trump about what Pecker told him and asked if he knew who McDougal was.
“His response to me was, ‘She’s really beautiful,’” Cohen said. Trump also told him to kill the story, he said.
Cohen testified that he regularly updated Trump on those efforts, and the DA’s office showed phone records between Trump and Cohen in that time period in an effort to bolster his claims.
He said he was present in Trump’s office when Pecker called in to say he’d struck a deal to buy McDougal’s story for $150,000. Trump told Pecker he’d reimburse him. “I’ll take care of it,” Cohen quoted him as saying. When Cohen later reported to Trump that the deal had finalized, he said Trump told him, “Fantastic.”
Cohen said Pecker later told him he did not want to be reimbursed, which Pecker testified was because the magazine’s lawyers were concerned about possible legal exposure.
Cohen was also asked about the release of the notorious “Access Hollywood” tape in October of 2016. The 2005 recording caught Trump boasting that he could grope women without their consent. Cohen said he was in London for his daughter’s birthday when news of the tape became public.
He said Trump called him and asked him to reach out to his contacts in the media. “And the spin that he wanted put on it was that this is locker room talk, something that Melania had recommended — or at least he told me that’s what Melania had thought — and use that in order to get control over the story and minimize the impact on him and his campaign,” Cohen said.
Stormy Daniels’ allegation
It was after then that Cohen heard from an executive at the Enquirer that porn actor Stormy Daniels was shopping a story about what she claimed was a 2006 sexual encounter with Trump — a story that Cohen said he feared could be lethal for Trump’s campaign, which was still reeling from the “Access Hollywood” scandal.
Cohen said he asked Trump about Daniels in 2011, when a website ran a story on the alleged encounter. He said Trump told him then that the two had met at a celebrity golf tournament while he was with then-Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger. He said Daniels liked him and that “women prefer Trump even over someone like Big Ben,” Cohen said.
When he asked if the allegation was true, Trump sidestepped the question, saying only that Daniels was “beautiful,” Cohen testified. Trump told him to handle the story, which he did, getting the posting removed and killing a potential magazine item on Daniels’ account, he said.
When Cohen told Trump her story had re-emerged during the 2016 presidential campaign, the then-candidate was irate: “This is a disaster, a total disaster,” he quoted Trump as saying. “Women are going to hate me. This is really a disaster. Women will hate me. Guys, they think it ’s cool. But this is going to be a disaster for the campaign.”
He said Trump urged him to stall Daniels on coming forward. “If I win, it won’t have any relevance. If I lose, I don’t really care,” Cohen recounted him as saying.
Cohen said at Trump’s direction he intentionally delayed paying Daniels the $130,000 he’d agreed to pay her — something Daniels’ lawyer Keith Davidson testified nearly torpedoed the deal. “I was following directions,” Cohen said.
Asked if Trump expressed concern about how his wife would react, Cohen said, “He wasn’t thinking about Melania. This was all about the campaign.”
Trump has denied any affair with Daniels.
Follow live updates from Trump’s hush money trial
Trump reimbursed Cohen in a series of payments in 2017, during the first months of his presidency. Prosecutors charge that Trump falsified business records relating to those payments by classifying them as legal services pursuant to a retainer agreement; the DA says no such agreement existed.
“Cohen was not being paid for legal services. The defendant was paying him back for an illegal payment to Stormy Daniels on the eve of the election,” prosecutor Matthew Colangelo said in his opening statement.
Daniels testified in the trial last week.
Blanche said in his opening statement that Cohen was indeed being paid for his legal services and “cannot be trusted.”
“You’ll learn that Mr. Cohen has misrepresented conversations where the only witness who was present for the conversation was Mr. Cohen and, allegedly, President Trump,” Blanche said.
“He’s a convicted felon. And he also is a convicted perjurer. He is an admitted liar,” Blanche added, referring in part to Cohen’s 2018 guilty plea to making false statements to Congress about a proposed project to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Prosecutors said he’d lied in order to minimize Trump’s ties to Russia, which were being scrutinized by Congress and federal investigators at that time.
Cohen also pleaded guilty to a number of other criminal charges, including tax fraud, in what a federal judge referred to as a “veritable smorgasbord” of criminal conduct when he sentenced him to three years in prison.
The road for Cohen to reach this moment has been a long one. He has been speaking with prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office off and on for the past five years, with investigators from the DA’s office even visiting him three times while he was in federal lockup in Otisville, New York, in 2019 and 2020.
Cohen was being questioned by veteran prosecutor Susan Hoffinger, who has been preparing Cohen for his testimony for about a year. He’ll be cross-examined by Trump’s lead attorney, Todd Blanche.
Blanche told the jury that Cohen is “obsessed” with Trump and blames him for “virtually all of his problems.”
The former president had extra support in the courtroom on Monday — his son Eric Trump, Sens. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, and Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., and Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., were all in attendance for the beginning of Cohen’s testimony. Trump sat with his eyes closed soon after his former lawyer began his testifying.
Cohen has repeatedly mocked Trump on social media and in interviews, including since the start of the trial, leading the judge presiding over the trial to warn that Cohen could be excluded from the gag order that bars Trump from attacking witnesses if he kept it up.
In court Friday, Blanche asked Judge Juan Merchan to impose a separate gag order on Cohen for the remainder of the trial, noting that despite his public assurances that he would stop bashing Trump, Cohen recently wore a T-shirt with Trump behind bars in an orange jumpsuit during a TikTok stream.
Merchan did not grant the gag order request, but he ordered prosecutors to “communicate to Mr. Cohen that the judge is asking him to refrain from making any more statements about this case, about Mr. Trump, or about anything related to this case or the process.”
Trump has repeatedly trashed Cohen to reporters and on social media ever since 2018, when his former attorney began cooperating with authorities against him. Those comments and posts — in violation of the gag order — led to thousands of dollars in court fines against Trump.
Trump has watched Cohen testify against him before. During last year’s civil fraud trial against Trump and his company, Cohen was a key witness for the New York Attorney General’s Office. At one point, Trump stormed out during Cohen’s testimony.
Cohen’s testimony this week comes as the hush money trial is nearing the finish line. Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass told the judge on Friday that the DA only had two witnesses remaining, and said it was likely that the prosecution will rest by the end of this week.
Trial proceedings will be shortened this week — court is not in session on Wednesday, nor will there be any activity on Friday so that Trump can attend his son’s high school graduation.
It’s unclear whether Trump will testify in his own defense. He is under no obligation to do so.