Disloyal

by Michael Cohen

  In truth, Trump had stayed in contact with her long after he stiffed her husband and the business she had run with her ex, telling her that she was married to a loser. She thought of Trump as a stalker and sued in 1997, but the case was settled out of court, along with the claim by her husband for money due for the Atlantic City event—a way to disguise the payoff to cover up the story about sexual assault, the ex-husband believed.

  The embittered ex now wanted revenge, and I had to stop him. To catch and kill the story, as instructed, I picked up the phone and dialed Jill Harth’s cell. A man picked up and I explained who I was, a process that I loved and that almost always had an incredible impact. My title as Executive Vice President and Special Counsel to Donald J. Trump had a hypnotic effect, I could see, especially on everyday people. I then asked to speak to Jill Harth.

  “Sure,” the man said, without asking why I was calling. “Hold on one second.”

  “Hi, this is Jill,” Ms. Harth said pleasantly.

  I knew right away from her tone of voice, even knowing that this was Trump-related, that she wasn’t going to be a problem, so I played nice.

  “I’m sure you know about the allegations being raised to media outlets by your ex-husband,” I said.

  “I do,” she replied.

  “I hope I can count on your assistance in refuting these malicious statements,” I said.

  I went on, “I see that you have kept in contact with Mr. Trump over the years,” my subtle—or not so subtle—way of letting her know I’d read her emails and was aware of her pleas for employment.

  “What I need from you is a statement emphatically denying the allegation. With both parties denying what is being said, any reporter would have to include both statements in a story, making the allegations look like a hit job on Trump or just irrelevant.”

  For twenty minutes, we talked about the best way to proceed. Bizarrely, perhaps, we never talked about the truth of what Trump was supposed to have done. As a woman, I guess she understood that what Pecker said was absolutely correct: the truth didn’t matter. She wanted work as a makeup artist and stylist, and a man like Trump could provide her the connections that would change her life. This was the underlying bedrock truth that was actually the central reality of the exchange. Jill Harth knew that if she went along with me, there was a chance she might make money, and conversely, if she didn’t, she would be fighting against forces that rendered her not just vulnerable but defenseless. Through my office, Trump could crush her like an insect—that was the subtext, and even as we talked politely, the stranglehold of money and power was on her throat.

  Yes, that was what I did, and yes, I know how wrong it was—but not at the time. I had no second thoughts or scruples, and it never occurred to me that there was no way to reconcile what I was doing with how I wanted my daughter to be treated, or my son to behave. That was what depravity looked like: depraved.

  “You know if I ask him to give me a job, he will,” she said, a forlorn attempt to assert some version of her own purchase on power.

  “I will see what I can do,” I replied, not quite dismissively, then reminding her of the real power at play. “But first I must get the statement from you, so we can put this issue to rest.”

  “Okay,” she said meekly.

  We crafted a statement, by which I mean I crafted a statement that she went along with, creating a narrative that was false, as she knew, and, sorry to say, so did I. The statement was thus ready for any reporter who pursued the story. This wasn’t pure catch and kill, as Trump didn’t pay her for her silence and I didn’t quash the story. I did something slightly different, as I learned the martial art of hiding marital infidelity. There was no media organization on the planet that was going to run a story based on unsubstantiated allegations of an aggrieved ex-husband that both his ex-wife and Trump denied, not without at least including the denials; it made no sense to publish what has been twisted into nothing more than unprintable nonsense.

  The story disappeared for nearly a decade, until Trump ran for President and she tried again to get work from the Boss, which in my line of work constituted great success.

  “Do me a favor,” Trump told me when I presented him with a copy of Jill Harth’s phony statement. “Make a copy of this and take it upstairs to Melania. Let her know this whole thing was bullshit and the ex-husband was trying to make a few bucks.”

  “Will do, Boss,” I replied.

  Trump sighed. “She really was great-looking back then,” he said, reminiscing fondly about the attractiveness of Jill Harth, and without doubt the time he’d stuck his hands between her legs and groped her.

  I called Melania, as instructed, and we performed a game of kabuki theater, each of us aware of the deception but following an unspoken rule that we wouldn’t acknowledge that reality. I told her about the false accusations circulating regarding Jill Harth and the story her ex-husband was trying to sell about Trump trying to force himself on her. She listened silently as I described the mutual denials, all while I could tell she knew I was lying.

  “I don’t care what people say or write,” she said. “Thank you for letting me know.”

  But she knew. She knew everything, but she didn’t do what most wives would do and insist on the whole story.

  * * *

  Back in my office, back in a place I’d begun to feel comfortable, useful, and like I belonged in a way I’d never really experienced before, I waited for my next assignment. Like everyone else at the Trump Organization, I was tasked with hunting for real estate deals for the company, but I was also a businessman running my own money, and I occasionally came across an opportunity that was too small or off-brand for Trump but that fit me perfectly. That was what happened when I identified a ninety-unit rental apartment building in uptown Manhattan that was up for sale. The price was excellent and it had a stable history of good tenants, so I took a run at acquiring it and was actually able to finance and close the deal. When I proudly told Trump about the fifty-eight-million-dollar purchase, his mood soured and he got petulant.

  “Why didn’t you bring the deal to me?” he asked.

  “It wasn’t big enough for you, Boss,” I said. “It wasn’t your kind of deal.”

  “You didn’t give me a chance,” he said, sulking. “Remember, you work for me first and foremost.”

  I was a little disheartened, mostly because I’d wanted to share the pleasure of the art of my deal with the man who’d supposedly written the book, but I knew his anger was exactly the same as the emotion he aimed at his children. Trump only cared about subjects that concerned him, and his benefit and well-being, so anything that detracted or distracted from the complete and utter focus on him and his ego was a waste of time and energy. The rejection was weirdly a kind of compliment from Trump, in that he was treating me just as he treated his children: badly.

  One of the more unusual aspects of working for the Trump Organization was how an entire floor of the Trump Tower was turned into a Hollywood sound stage for episodes of The Apprentice. Trump would call me, in his gruff voice, like Don Corleone, and say I should come to the set to watch the proceedings. For days on end, I would sit in the control booth witnessing the antics, part of my job description that might give you a sense of how damn fun it could be working for the Trump Organization. Yes, Trump yelled and screamed and bullied, and I was one of his favorite targets for derision and insults, and yes, he asked the impossible and required that no one around him ask any questions or doubt his word, and yes, much of what I did was morally and legally and ethically repulsive and soulless. But you won’t understand the full picture unless you can grasp how incredibly entertaining it was not just to watch the insane spectacle of manipulation and debasement that constituted reality television at its highest level. I was part of the action, in on the joke, the recipient of Trump’s knowing winks and grins. If Trump was playing the world for a ship of fools, a common
denominator of confidence artists all through the ages, then at least I was his first mate, or, maybe more honestly, lackey. It was kind of like the old joke—and I loved old jokes; I was a member of New York’s legendary private comedians’ club, The Friars Club, and often attended their celebrity roasts—where the circus worker is shoveling elephant shit and someone asks him why he doesn’t find a better job. What, he asks, and leave show business? That was me: shoveling shit but part of the show.

  Trump’s older kids were co-stars on the show, and it was evident that they were thrilled at all the attention and glamour associated with performing in the top-rated reality TV show. The same was true for some employees, like Trump’s assistant, Rhona Graff, who appeared occasionally. I wound up as co-president of the production company that made The Apprentice and Celebrity Apprentice, and I routinely suggested people I’d met as contestants.

  But it wasn’t long after I started working for Trump that the global financial crisis hit the real estate industry. Trump likes to pretend he’d foreseen the disaster, much as he liked to lie about opposing the Iraq invasion of 2003 from the start, twenty-twenty hindsight being a specialty of his, but he was as clueless as any average Joe, I can attest with absolute certainty. When I signed on to work for Trump, I assumed he was a multi-billionaire with hundreds of millions in cash on hand at all times, ready to pounce on an opportunity at a moment’s notice. What I was discovering was that Trump wasn’t nearly the man advertised in The Art of the Deal. To start with, after 2008 and the free fall in value of his various real estate holdings, including Trump Tower and his golf courses, he effectively dropped out of the building business.

  “No one is going to develop properties in this market,” he told me. “You’d have to be out of your fucking mind to try to sell condos in this market.”

  Thus did Donald Trump’s supposedly triumphant career as an iconic real estate developer end: quietly, with no fanfare or acknowledgement; he still pretended to be a builder, and it played a big part in his coming political career, but the truth was that he turned virtually all of his focus to tending to his brand-licensing deals. There would be an occasional exception to this rule, like the acquisition of the Doral golf course in 2011, but Trump spent his waking hours chasing money from endorsements for products like Trump Steaks and Trump Vodka and, infamously, Trump University. He’d endorse pretty much anything, as long as he had a piece of the action and didn’t have to put up any money. This hardly was the expected activity of a billionaire investor, of course, and I often wondered about the truth of his net worth. Trump certainly fixated on my growing wealth from my real estate holdings and taxi medallions. He frequently commented on the amount of money I had as a way to throw it in my face that he was so much richer than me. It was like water off a duck’s back to me, but it fed his need to demean people around him who had the temerity to get ahead in life; success was always a zero-sum game for him, and he and he alone had to be the winner.

  Calculating Trump’s real net worth was one of the strangest and most telling aspects of life in the Trump Organization. When Forbes and Fortune and the other publications that measured wealth were compiling the list of the richest people on earth, Trump would go into a frenzy. He would have CFO Allen Weisselberg and me concoct the highest possible number, inflating the valuation of his buildings and golf courses by using the absolute most optimistic comparable properties, and then we’d juice that number and juice it again and again until the Boss had a number that satisfied the requirements of his ego. Conversely, as you’ll see in later pages with potential criminal consequences, when it came time to pay taxes—an obligation Trump didn’t minimize or avoid, but rather almost certainly illegally evaded—the same properties would be deemed essentially worthless, or better yet the subject of giant capital losses which he could then deduct. I remember sitting in Trump’s office on the 26th floor when a tax refund check for $10 million from the government arrived. He held the check up for me to see, flabbergasted but also delighted.

  “Can you believe how fucking stupid the IRS is?” Trump asked. “Who would give me a refund of ten fucking million dollars? They are so stupid!”

  But the biggest thing that was happening in these early years was that I was becoming fluent in Trump’s secret language of silences, nods, and signals, to the degree that I was turning into his alter ego.

  In the 1980s, Trump had had a fake spokesperson named John Barron, who would call tabloid reporters to boast about the Boss’s sexual prowess and all the beautiful women he’d dated; it has always seemed more than a little odd that his youngest son’s first name is Barron, though whatever that might indicate, I’ll leave to the shrinks. In the 1990s, the avatar was named Johnny Miller, and he would shamelessly brag about Trump’s wealth and sexual conquests, in a voice that was uncannily like the Boss’s—because it was his voice. These semi-comical charades were transparent to most every reporter, but they served a mutually useful purpose: providing lazy journalists with easy headlines, and also shoveling coal into the always red-hot furnace of Trump’s ego.

  In the 2000s, Trump came up with an even better idea. Instead of using a fake character, he developed a real, live double who could speak to the press on his behalf and shamelessly extoll his truly incredible, mind blowing, unique and huge talents. That person was me: I was his John Barron and Johnny Miller. In that capacity, I kept up a constant stream of calls with journalists at the New York Post and the Daily News, as well as The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the National Enquirer. In truth, my most important task was learning to channel the voice of Donald Trump and to convey his thoughts on any subject without having to ask him what he wanted to say; I was like Howdy Doody or Charlie McCarthy, a ventriloquist doll speaking for the Boss and faithfully saying precisely what he would say, no matter how crass or stupid.

  In many ways I wasn’t really a lawyer for Trump so much as a surrogate and attack dog with a law license. Along the way, I got involved in all of the wacky business ideas that Trump got involved in, many of them of the white trash and violent variety—one of the little-appreciated ways that he connected with the white working-class people in the Midwest who propelled him into the White House and remain his base of so-called deplorables. Professional wrestling was one of Trump’s earliest connections with the tastes of baseball-cap wearing, pickup-driving men who otherwise would seem a million miles away from Trump’s pampered and gilded gold existence. Fast food, trash TV, leering at attractive women—Trump channeled blue-collar white men because that was part of how he saw life, but also because he knew he could make a buck that way.

  In 2009, Trump made a deal with his friend Vince McMahon of World Wrestling Entertainment to appear in a WWE Raw stunt. In this charade, McMahon would sell WWE Raw, only to later learn that it was his nemesis, Donald Trump, who was the purchaser. I was tasked with reviewing the Agreement and making sure that Trump received the agreed-upon fee. Trump had a longstanding relationship with McMahon and loved the bread and circus aspect of wrestling, with the phony plot lines known as “kayfabe” pretty much exactly matching the nutball narrative he carried around in his head about life, politics, and the intelligence of his audience.

  One afternoon, Vince McMahon came to Trump Tower to go over the plot they’d stage for the event, which involved Trump slapping him in the face. To rehearse, McMahon asked Trump to stand up and slap him. Trump was reluctant.

  “I don’t want to slap you,” he said. “I’ll hurt you.”

  “Don’t worry,” said McMahon. “Give me a real slap. Not a soft one. The crowd needs a real slap.”

  “Really?” Trump shrugged and gave him a soft slap across the cheek.

  “That’s a girl slap,” McMahon said. “Let me have it. Reach back and put your whole body into it.”

  “Really?”

  McMahon nodded.

  Trump was grinning now, clearly enjoying the idea of being able to slap someone around wit
h no consequences—indeed, to get praised for it. Trump was a big man, 6’3”, easily 275 pounds, and even though he was in terrible shape and flabby, I knew he was plenty strong. Trump reared back, as we all flinched in anticipation, apart from McMahon, who was also obviously enjoying schooling his new pupil in the finer points of fake violence. Then the Boss smacked him hard.

  McMahon rubbed his face, while the crowd in Trump’s office giggled in disbelief.

  “Okay,” said McMahon. “Now really let me have it.”

  “Oh, man,” Trump said, this time really letting go and giving him a very hard five-finger smack! across the face and nose, the crack of skin on skin echoing into the hallway like a slapshot, and causing us all to burst out laughing as McMahon rubbed his ruby-red cheek and chuckled.

  “This is going to be some show, Vince,” Trump said. “We’ll make it look real for them.”

  “Yeah,” said McMahon. “Real real.”

  We all flew to Green Bay, Wisconsin for the event titled Trump: The New Owner of WWE Raw. All of us invited were eager to experience what we knew was going to be a wild, fun night. In the dressing room under the stadium, we could hear the mounting noise of the crowd coming in, and it was obvious that the place was going to be sold out, not to mention the huge pay-per-view audience. This was when Don Jr. spoke out of turn, at least in the eyes of his taskmaster father.

  “Hey, Dad, are you nervous?” he asked.

  “What did you say?” Trump asked, his face reddening. “I’m going in front of millions of people. What kind of stupid fucking question is that? Get out of here.”