Disloyal: A Memoir

by Michael Cohen

  “You know, Mr. Trump, our town hall is open to our members, who will be asking you some very difficult and direct questions,” Palomarez said. “For example, are you anti-Hispanic, or anti-immigrant? Those are fair questions that need to be answered because of your campaign launch and the reports that there have been no legitimate answers from you.”

  “Javier, let me tell you, I am not anti-Hispanic or anti-immigrant,” Trump said, adopting his best political mien, exactly as he’d done with the evangelicals back in 2011 when they laid hands on him—the spectacle that convinced me the Boss could become president because he was so adept at being deceptive and disingenuous. “In fact, both my parents were immigrants,” he added, another gratuitous lie, because his father had been born in the United States. “Two of my three wives have been immigrants.”

  Back and forth they went, as Trump transformed himself into a thoughtful and compassionate businessman without a racist bone in his body, just as he’d pretended to be religious with the Falwells and the other Christian leaders. Like the evangelicals, Palomarez was eating it up, to my amazement. The sight of two grown men engaging in an elaborate charade was almost comical to behold. The meeting was going well, really well, largely because Trump was mouthing platitudes and Palomarez wasn’t calling bullshit on the Boss’s racist remarks by quoting them back.

  “Mr. Trump, I am pleased by this meeting,” Palomarez said as he departed. “I hope that we will continue to talk and that you will consider participating in my town hall.”

  “You and Michael stay in touch,” Trump said. “I will speak to my team and try to set up a date for your event.”

  After Palomarez and the two others departed, Trump shook his head.

  “What a phony bullshit artist,” he said. “He and the whole Hispanic Chamber of Commerce thing is a fucking scam. Like Al Sharpton’s bullshit group. Who knows, who cares. No matter what, I’m not doing his fucking town hall. And did you hear in the middle when I asked him how the organization supports itself? Through donations and dues and advertising, he said. He was looking for me to become one of his suckers. Fuck him. I don’t regret what I said about Mexicans. What I said was fucking true.”

  When I returned to my desk, I received a call from security in the lobby that a press conference was being held. I knew immediately it was Javier, so I raced to the elevator and made it to the lobby in time to see him leaving the building with the press in tow. When I called his cell, he claimed his comments to the media had been neutral but when the stories hit the wire they were critical of Trump and I knew that would go down like a lead balloon with the Boss. I called Javier again, this time yelling and threatening to release a statement from Trump calling him a phony bullshit artist. How would he like that, I asked?

  “Please,” Javier said, trying to calm me down. “Let’s put out a joint statement that can correct any issues you think exist and that is mutually beneficial.”

  The next morning, Trump was at his desk reading about his meeting with Palomarez, I saw nervously, waiting for him to go off on the fact that it was meant to be private and not in the press. But he wasn’t pissed, for a change.

  “Did you see the amount of press we got for meeting with the guy?” Trump said. “Not bad.”

  “I did, Boss,” I replied. “They were mostly favorable. I know his people are going to call to ask about the town hall. What should I say?”

  “That?” Trump said. “Not a chance.”

  * * *

  As Trump started to travel to early-primary states, like New Hampshire and Iowa, I remained in New York, working as his personal attorney and frequent surrogate on TV, with my ability to channel the Boss and his views with great impact. At least, that was how Trump and I saw my role. I’d do two or three shows in a row, with Fox inviting me to stay for the whole day doing hits every hour.

  My regular appearances on TV outraged Lewandowski, mostly because he wanted to control everything, it seemed to me, and I wasn’t going let him have any say-so about my media appearances. I didn’t work for the campaign and he had no authority over my actions or words, which admittedly were often over the top or just plain crazy. Like the story about Trump allegedly raping his first wife, Ivana, based on her testimony from the nineties during their divorce proceedings. I first heard about this issue when Hope Hicks came to my office with a stricken look on her face. She had received an email from a young reporter named Tim Mak from The Daily Beast saying that he had information that Trump had raped Ivana during their marriage and he was running a story on the testimony from her deposition during their divorce—did Donald Trump’s campaign have a comment? Hope was beside herself, not knowing what to do or say, but at least she had the presence of mind to come to my office, the correct destination for dirty work like this promised to be.

  I walked to Trump’s office and explained the situation with Mak and the Daily Beast. Trump didn’t seem fazed at all. He called out to Rhona, who went to her trusty filing cabinet and pulled out one of the multitude of manila folders, handing it to me as I returned to Trump’s office to read it while he sat silently watching me. I wasn’t given the whole deposition, only the relevant pages, as if Trump had anticipated this subject coming up some day. The portrait in the testimony was of an aggrieved and scorned woman in a bitter fight with her soon-to-be ex-husband and using the occasion to cast any and all possible aspersions on Trump. Typical wealthy Manhattan divorce testimony, in other words, with Ivana Trump saying she didn’t feel loved by her husband when they had sex in the aftermath of a failed hair replacement operation—the very surgery that prompted the Boss to design his intricate, three-step flip, flop, flap combover to hide the scars.

  “Emotional rape” was the precise term Ivana had used to describe the encounter. But English was her third of four languages and her choice of words was obviously unsophisticated; a native of then-Czechoslovakia, she spoke English with a heavy accent and often didn’t seem to know the implications or subtleties of what she was saying, Trump told me.

  “This is bullshit, Boss,” I said.

  “I never raped anyone,” Trump said.

  He folded his arms, a scowl on his face. “Call Mak and set this straight.”

  Returning to my office, I started to think about the older Trump kids and how they’d lived through a messy and very public divorce as young children—one of the most notorious in decades in New York City. The private lives of their parents had played out on the front page of the tabloids as their father publicly betrayed their mother and put the children in an impossible situation. Don Jr. had often talked about how badly the kids had been scarred by the divorce and all the years when they’d not seen much of their father; for a period of time, Don Jr. had refused to speak to his father because of his fury and pain over how he’d treated his mother and siblings.

  All that awful tabloid horror was now going to be relived in public? What about young Barron? My outrage was building as I reached for my phone to call Mak. Some two-bit reporter I’d never heard of—and I knew pretty much all the good journalists in New York—was going to hurt Trump’s kids and make them go through all that pain again for a cheap-shot headline? What about the grandchildren? They were getting old enough to understand and read the news, and they would surely be inundated with sensational stories about their strange but loved grandfather raping their grandmother?

  I was livid by the time I got Mak on the line and denied the Boss had done any such thing—and then added that it wasn’t legally possible to rape your own wife. I knew this wasn’t true, of course, but this was one of the ways that truth and I were starting to part ways.

  Mak replied that he was in possession of the deposition and he was going to run the story, no matter what I said. Again and again, I demanded some basic human decency and consideration for the children and grandchildren, but he wasn’t listening to me and his intransigence was making me insanely furious—not that I needed much p
rovocation in those days.

  I hissed at Mak that I was going to go after him personally, along with “everybody else you possibly know.” I added, charmingly, “So I’m warning you, tread very fucking lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting. Do you understand me?”

  Sound like someone in possession of their mind?

  When Mak ran the story of the rape allegation, along with an extensive quote of my threats toward him, I immediately released a statement repenting my behavior. “As an attorney, husband, and father, there are many injustices that offend me, but none more than racism and rape,” I said. “Rarely am I surprised by the press, but the gall of this particular reporter to make such a reprehensible and false allegation against Mr. Trump truly stunned me. In my moment of shock and anger I made an inarticulate comment—which I do not believe—and which I apologize for entirely.”

  There were calls for me to be fired, but Trump refused to let me go despite the demands of Lewandowski. But, of course, Trump went public to distance himself from me, saying he didn’t agree that a husband couldn’t rape his wife, and that I had been speaking for myself, not him, yet another foreshadowing that I didn’t notice—or want to notice.

  As I said in the introduction to this book, there was no excuse for my behavior, and no apology, no matter how sincere—and I am truly, sincerely sorry—erases my actions and or takes away my responsibility for my conduct. I offer this story by way of an explanation, to allow you to understand the nature and severity of the affliction that possessed me. In this way, I was like the millions of Americans who now line up for hours in the driving snow in some town in Wisconsin to hear Trump’s hour-long stream-of-consciousness comedy act—because that’s what he is, a stand-up comic, with a grotesque sense of humor.

  But I get ahead of myself.

  Sulking after my attack on Tim Mak of the Daily Beast came out, Lewandowski told me I was now in the “penalty box,” his term for being out of his favor and not being allowed to play the game; he’d been a hockey player in high school, apparently, and imagined himself to be the referee of the Trump campaign, a notion I found insulting and ridiculous. I just ignored Lewandowski, safe in the knowledge that the Boss was pleased by my performances and that he privately approved of my hyper-aggressive and relentlessly attacking approach to advocating on his behalf.

  But I wasn’t the only one supposedly in Lewandowski’s stupid penalty box. Sean Hannity and I were close. I’d met him in 2011, when the Boss was first thinking of running, and we hit it off as I appeared frequently on his show as a Trump promoter, providing good ratings by ranting and raving about the Boss. In the years since, we’d talked frequently, often on a daily basis, discussing the state of the world and the relative strengths of potential Republican candidates, including Trump. We’d also talked about business matters and our personal lives, as confidants and pals. Sean was making a boatload of money at Fox, somewhere around $30 million a year, and he wanted to learn about investing in real estate. He was building a portfolio of properties spread around the country as a way to ensure real and durable wealth for his family, and he frequently asked my opinion about particular deals and strategies and partnerships.

  Sean never hired or paid me as his attorney, and now he claims I never represented him, and that was true, but it didn’t stop him from talking to me as a counselor and confessor, roles that suited me. During this time, Sean said that his marriage was in serious trouble, with divorce looming in the air.

  “You don’t want to do that,” I said. “What about your kids? You want to lose half your money?”

  “You have a point there,” Hannity said.

  “Is there another woman involved?” I asked. “You been screwing around?”

  Sean sighed. Like Trump, he knew how to say something without actually saying it, which is how men of power and wealth actually are, in my experience: they want to confess to their peers, by way of bragging, but they don’t want to outright admit to cheating, finding a way both to express their virility and retain plausible deniability.

  “There are so many women in the world,” Hannity sighed. “There are just so many women out there.”

  In the summer of 2015, I knew that Hannity was doing what he could for the Trump campaign, but that he had to be careful. His viewership wasn’t monolithically for Trump, yet, and there were more than a dozen candidates, some commanding large segments of the Republican Party. Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, and each of the other declared candidates had to be given time to make their case, meaning that Trump didn’t absolutely dominate Hannity’s highly rated show in the way that the Boss wanted—and that Lewandowski demanded.

  Hannity’s best efforts didn’t stop Lewandowski from attacking him; like every reporter covering Trump, he was submitted to a brutal and frequently idiotic set of rules and expectations that required strict conformity to the Boss’s campaign manager’s idea of what the press should cover. Corey’s way of punishing the allegedly wayward was to put them in the penalty box, just as he’d tried unsuccessfully to do to me. Reporters didn’t take kindly to this treatment, of course, and neither did powerful opinion talk show hosts like Sean Hannity. This was especially true for a commentator who was on friendly terms with Trump’s personal attorney and who was obviously trying to walk a fine line to maintain credibility with Fox’s audience. Full-throated support of Trump wouldn’t help ratings, I knew, and nor was there any indication that it would help the Boss’s campaign.

  “Why am I in the penalty box?” Hannity asked me one day. “We’ve got to stop this bullshit.”

  I rolled my eyes at the idiocy of the situation. I quickly discovered that Lewandowski was telling Trump that Hannity was secretly a Cruz supporter and that he was insidiously undermining the Boss by pretending to be neutral but subliminally messaging his viewers to vote for the Texas senator. Trump was always prone to listen to the last person who spoke to him, frequently the advisor floating the worst and most destructive idea, and in those days, Lewandowski was often that person. Appealing to Trump’s paranoia and rage was a surefire way to get him to take rash action.

  I made my way to Trump’s office.

  “We’ve gotta end this bullshit with Hannity,” I said to Trump.

  “Fuck him,” Trump said. “The guy’s a fucking traitor.”

  “A traitor in what way?” I asked.

  “Corey told me he’s backing Cruz,” Trump said.

  “Really, where did he get that information?” I asked. “How does he know this or anything at all on the matter?”

  “You just hate Corey,” Trump said. “No matter what he says, you always say the opposite.”

  “I acknowledge that I despise him,” I said. “He’s an alcoholic piece of shit. But what does that have to do with Hannity?”

  I took a breath.

  “Hannity is on your side,” I said. “He just can’t show it. He can’t seem partial, otherwise he loses credibility, and so do you.”

  Trump tilted his head back and crinkled his nose and puckered his mouth in his distinctive fashion, like he’d sucked on a lemon or caught wind of a fart.

  “Get him on the phone,” he said.

  I dialed Sean’s digits and he picked up immediately, even though he was in the middle of performing his daily radio talk show, pausing to take a commercial break to field my call.

  “What’s up,” he said. “I’m on air.”

  “I’m with the Boss,” I said, my phone on speaker. “He’s listening to us now. Feel free to tell Mr. Trump what you told me.”

  “Mr. Trump, Lewandowski’s a piece of shit and a liar,” Hannity said. “I can’t come out publicly to endorse you at this time. It would destroy my credibility as it relates to you. But I want you to know that I am today and have always been behind you.”

  Trump was now listening intently, nodding at the ritualistic prostrat
ion of the Fox host explaining how his show really worked.

  “I speak to Michael on a daily basis,” Hannity said. “Anything he has asked me to do that benefits you, I have done.”

  “That’s true, Boss,” I said.

  “Okay, fine, let’s forget about it,” Trump said.

  Hannity was keen to do more supplication, it seemed. “Mr. Trump, I’d like to call you later.”

  “Okay,” Trump said.

  “Thank you, sir,” Hannity said. “Thank you for believing in me, because I believe in you.”

  Thus ended the Hannity embargo, and thus it went in Trump’s campaign with the internecine fighting always threatening to turn into outright warfare.

  * * *

  The debate of August 6, 2015 was held in Cleveland, Ohio, and broadcast on Fox News and Facebook. It was the first debate and the most anticipated question that loomed was how Trump would perform. He’d never participated in a formal debate before, making him a neophyte up against practiced and supposedly ruthless opposition. The world had no idea what was coming, and neither did the deer-in-the-headlights Republicans who were helpless to counter the sheer aggressive force of Donald Trump.

  I watched the debate from the house I’d rented in Bridgehampton, on Long Island, for the summer. With my personal wealth rising inexorably—I thought—I’d paid a quarter of a million dollars to rent a giant Italianate mansion with 15,000 square feet, a two-story pool house, tennis court, and more bedrooms than I could count. Padding around the palace with Laura and the kids and a constant stream of friends seeking an escape from Manhattan’s oppressive summer heat, I had become more or less a spectator to the campaign. Trump and I talked most every day, and I was up to the minute on every development, but I also kept some distance in order to keep the peace.

  The moderator was Fox News’s Megyn Kelly, and she went after Trump in a far more aggressive manner than his opponents, questioning the way he’d treated women, including the crude insults he’d aimed at Rosie O’Donnell. I winced as Trump tried to push back, knowing that he’d be filled with rage afterwards. No one talked to Trump like that, I knew, and the O’Donnell feud had indeed been one of the lowest of his many Twitter lows. My knowledge was firsthand, because I had access to Trump’s Twitter account and permission to post on his behalf, one of only two people with that privilege. I’d been part of the brain trust coming up with juvenile taunts to O’Donnell, and so I was acutely aware of the childish impulse behind the insults.