The Fixers by Joe Palazzolo & Michael Rothfeld

Author:Joe Palazzolo & Michael Rothfeld
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-01-13T16:00:00+00:00

21.

THOUGHT STARTERS

DONALD TRUMP’S PRESIDENCY ushered in heady days at American Media. David Pecker had fulfilled his promise to use his publications to help Trump’s campaign, and now he—and his company—knew they had a friend in the White House. With the news of his catch-and-kill deal for Trump having passed seemingly without consequence, American Media continued to promote him on the covers of its publications.

McDougal had kept mum about her affair with Trump since her agreement became public in November 2016, though she had no legal obligation to do so. During the presidential campaign, Ted Boutrous, one of the nation’s top media lawyers, had offered free representation to any woman sued by Trump for accusing him of wrongdoing. A friend of McDougal’s reached out to him, and Boutrous then helped McDougal negotiate an amendment to the contract that permitted her to respond to “legitimate press inquiries regarding the facts of her alleged relationship with Donald Trump.” McDougal was still barred from selling her story to another media company, and she needed written consent from American Media before sitting for interviews.

American Media was surprisingly accommodating. Howard told McDougal that the company wanted to continue its partnership with her and offered to hire a public relations team to bring in endorsements for McDougal and create a new brand for her “in the fitness space.” She appeared on the cover of the spring 2017 edition of Muscle & Fitness Hers, her first of two guaranteed American Media covers. And she held out hope for more.

If it wasn’t an explicit trade, McDougal knew that she stood a better chance of advancing her career through American Media if she kept silent about the affair, even when she received “legitimate press inquiries.” When The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin was working on a profile of David Pecker in June 2017, he contacted McDougal about her contract with American Media. She forwarded the request to the company, which crafted a benign “no comment” for her. She emailed Toobin: “I don’t really like to talk about things other than my interests and passions—and that’s health, wellness, etc, etc!!”

The New Yorker published arty black-and-white pictures of the tabloid king, by now sixty-five years old and wearing his mustache a little less bushy after a few decades. His mane, still slicked back, had gone silver. The headline pulled no punches. “The National Enquirer’s Fervor for Trump,” it read, with a blunter subhead: “The tabloid is defined by its predatory spirit. Why has it embraced the President with such sycophantic zeal?”

Pecker, who spent hours with Toobin, was candid about slanting coverage for the president, whom he called “a personal friend of mine,” although he misled the writer about the McDougal deal. “When her people contacted me that she had a story on Trump, everybody was contacting her,” Pecker told Toobin. “At the same time, she was launching her own beauty-and-fragrance line, and I said that I’d be very interested in having her in one of my magazines, now that she’s so famous.”

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