As the 2016 presidential election approached, reporters around the country chased the stories of a string of women who were speaking about unsavory encounters they said they had with Donald J. Trump. In the middle of this scrum, a different kind of tip came into The Wall Street Journal: a lawyer was arranging payoffs to silence other women from Mr. Trump’s past.
That tip led The Journal, where I worked then, to report that The National Enquirer had paid $150,000 to suppress a Playboy model’s account of her affair with Mr. Trump. The article, published four days before Mr. Trump won the election, was the first inkling of the crimes that have resulted eight years later in the unprecedented criminal conviction of a U.S. president.
The road in between was long and circuitous, upending numerous lives before a Manhattan jury voted on Thursday to find Mr. Trump guilty of falsifying records at his company to cover up a hush-money scheme. The Manhattan district attorney’s office characterized the plot as part of a conspiracy to illegally tilt the 2016 election in his favor.
Details of Mr. Trump’s involvement emerged slowly, over the course of years, through the work of reporters and investigators, and ultimately, through revelations from some of his closest associates. It was a story vigorously pursued by countless media organizations, from its beginning until what now seems like its end.
One focal point was David Pecker, the former publisher of The National Enquirer and Mr. Trump’s decades-long associate, whose company paid the Playboy model, Karen McDougal, for the rights to her story of a 10-month affair with Mr. Trump that began in 2006.
At The Journal, we obtained firm evidence of that deal. The tip we received led us to Keith Davidson, a Los Angeles lawyer who represented Ms. McDougal. My former colleague, Joe Palazzolo, obtained a copy of her contract with The Enquirer’s parent company, in a brown folder tied with a ribbon, during a clandestine meeting with a source near the brass clock in Grand Central Terminal.
In our Nov. 4, 2016 article, we used the phrase “catch and kill” to describe the old tabloid tactic The Enquirer had used to suppress a negative story on Mr. Trump’s behalf. But we couldn’t get to the bottom of what role Mr. Trump had played, if any.
Another mystery lingered: We reported then that Mr. Davidson had also represented Stormy Daniels, a porn star who had been shopping her own story before the election about a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump a decade earlier, but had gone silent. It took Joe and I more than a year to figure out why. On Jan. 12, 2018, in the second year of Mr. Trump’s presidency, The Journal reported that Ms. Daniels had been paid $130,000 to keep quiet by Michael Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, shortly before the election.
Mr. Cohen, like Mr. Pecker had before him, initially insulated Mr. Trump, who has maintained he did not have sex with Ms. McDougal or Ms. Daniels. Mr. Cohen acknowledged making the hush-money payment, but said at the time that he was responsible for it. He told Maggie Haberman, my current colleague at The Times, that he had not been reimbursed by The Trump Organization or the Trump campaign. But Mr. Cohen pointedly avoided addressing whether he’d been repaid by Mr. Trump personally, as he had in fact been.
In April 2018, F.B.I. agents raided Mr. Cohen’s apartment, office and a hotel room. On the same day, other agents arrived at Mr. Pecker’s home in Greenwich, Conn., and the Manhattan apartment of The Enquirer’s editor, Dylan Howard, bearing subpoenas and search warrants to seize the men’s cellphones.
The next month, Rudolph W. Giuliani, who had just joined Mr. Trump’s legal team, casually linked the president to the $130,000 payment to Ms. Daniels. The disclosure on Fox News seemed to take the host, Sean Hannity, by surprise. Mr. Giuliani said the money had been “funneled through a law firm, and the president repaid it.”
“Oh. I didn’t know that,” Mr. Hannity said. “He did?”
That summer, The Times reported the existence of direct evidence of Mr. Trump’s involvement: a recording Mr. Cohen had secretly made speaking to him about the McDougal deal before the election. He had left the recording on a device that federal agents seized.
Mr. Trump’s insulation began to thin. Mr. Pecker hired a lawyer and began talking to federal prosecutors. And Mr. Cohen’s relationship with Mr. Trump began to erode as the Trump Organization balked at paying his legal fees.
Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty in August of that year to federal campaign finance violations, along with tax evasion and making false statements to a bank in his private business dealings. In court, he said Mr. Trump had directed the hush-money payments.
After Mr. Trump left office in 2021, the Manhattan district attorney’s office started investigating the hush-money scheme, leading to Mr. Trump’s indictment last year.
Over the years, new bits and pieces of Mr. Trump’s personal involvement with the hush-money deals emerged through media reporting and court filings. And as the trial began in April, new details emerged from witnesses connected to the deals.
As Mr. Trump watched from the defense table, his lawyers tried to maintain the distance between him and all the sordidness. Mr. Cohen was the “greatest liar of all time,” Mr. Trump’s lead lawyer, Todd Blanche, declared in his closing statement. He claimed Mr. Davidson had extorted Mr. Trump in the hush-money deal reached with Ms. Daniels, which the lawyer, in his testimony, had called a “settlement.”
In the end, one of the women who had been paid for her silence used her voice to effectively push back.
During cross-examination, it was suggested to Ms. Daniels that she had lied about having sex with Mr. Trump.
“You have a lot of experience in making phony stories about sex appear to be real, right?” another one of his lawyers, Susan Necheles, asked Ms. Daniels.
“The sex in the films, it’s very much real,” Ms. Daniels retorted. “Just like what happened to me in that room.”
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