Even before former President Donald J. Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal a sex scandal, a verdict was being delivered on The National Enquirer.
The no-holds-barred supermarket tabloid was once famous for publishing salacious stories about celebrities and politicians. Now it may be better known for suppressing them.
“It’s just a tragedy for the paper,” said Barry Levine, the publication’s former executive editor, sitting in the living room of his one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan on a recent morning.
Was he being overly dramatic? Perhaps.
Even among those who consider it a guilty pleasure, The Enquirer can hardly be described as a national treasure. But try telling that to Mr. Levine, a swashbuckling journalist who worked there from 1999 until 2016 and whose professional and personal identity was shaped by it.
“I grew up with the romantic vision of ‘The Front Page,’ the press cards and hats, the larger than life personalities of Fleet Street reporters who did whatever they had to do to get the story,” Mr. Levine said. “I was in love with that type of journalism — and I found it at The National Enquirer.”
Long before it became known as a protector of Mr. Trump, the tabloid reported aggressively on politicians on both sides of the aisle, including Jesse Jackson and Sarah Palin.
Mr. Levine helped secure The Enquirer some mainstream respectability, thanks to a series of scoops on John Edwards, a Democrat who was at one point a serious contender in the 2008 presidential race.
On Mr. Levine’s watch, The Enquirer plowed hundreds of thousands of dollars into an aggressive investigation of Mr. Edwards, with some of that money going to anonymous tipsters and sources who said that the candidate’s squeaky-clean image was misleading.
In October 2007, the tabloid broke the news that Mr. Edwards had been involved in an affair with Rielle Hunter, a videographer on the campaign staff, while his wife suffered from an incurable form of cancer. Mr. Edwards at first dismissed the story as “completely untrue” and “ridiculous.”
After Ms. Rielle gave birth to a daughter, the tabloid delivered more scoops beneath gleeful headlines: “John Edwards Love Child Scandal!”; “John Edwards With Love Child! The Photos Everyone’s Been Waiting For”; “John Edwards Mistress Demands He Pay Love Child $10 Million”; “John Edwards’ Wife Tells Mistress, ‘I Hope You Die!’ Their Secret Showdown.”
The Enquirer’s coverage helped knock Mr. Edwards out of the race. It also paved the way for a criminal prosecution in which he was charged with federal campaign finance violations for payments to Ms. Rielle, a case that ended without a conviction.
The tabloid’s reporting on Mr. Edwards won new respect for a publication that had been derided as a bottom feeder in news media circles. All that collapsed, Mr. Levine said, during four days of testimony in a Manhattan courtroom in April. That was when David Pecker, the former publisher of The Enquirer, described under oath his efforts to help Mr. Trump suppress stories seen as damaging to his 2016 campaign.
Mr. Pecker told prosecutors that he had bought two stories and never published them, deploying the strategy known among tabloid hands as “catch and kill.” One of those stories came from a Trump building doorman who had heard a false rumor that Mr. Trump had fathered a child out of wedlock; the other was from a former Playboy model who said she had had an affair with Mr. Trump.
When Mr. Trump was slow to kick in for the cost of those cover-ups, Mr. Pecker declined to “catch and kill” a third Trump story — Stormy Daniels’s account of her sexual encounter with him in 2006. (Mr. Trump denies the encounter.)
“‘I am not a bank,’” Mr. Pecker recalled saying to Michael Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former fixer.
The testimony made Mr. Levine cringe, partly because it coincided with the financial downturn of the publication he loved — a change in fortune that is less debatable than the supposed loss of its moral compass.
The publication became a nationwide hit under a previous owner, Generoso Pope Jr., who took the New York Enquirer, a New York City tabloid, and transformed it into The National Enquirer, a sensationalist supermarket staple. And in addition to running tales of extraterrestrials’ abducting human beings, it published a front-page photo of Elvis Presley lying in his coffin.
Mr. Levine noted that when he joined The Enquirer in 1999, its average weekly sales were slightly north of two million. Last year, the number was around 56,000. The Enquirer’s parent company has been trying to unload the tabloid since 2019; two deals have fallen through.
“There’s still a small population of people who are willing to plunk down the money to buy The Enquirer at the supermarket,” Mr. Levine said. “But the history I was part of is destroyed.”
The tabloid’s involvement in the political sphere came fully to light in 2018, when its owner, American Media Inc., admitted to federal prosecutors, as part of a non-prosecution agreement, that it had aided the Trump campaign by publishing articles favorable to the candidate and burying stories that might make him look bad.
But for Mr. Levine, the testimony of Mr. Pecker was the thing that guaranteed the tabloid could never regain the reputation it had built in its finest hours. “I don’t know how you can ever get that back,” Mr. Levine said, “particularly now, in light of the statements David Pecker made on the stand.”
On a nearby side table was a framed photograph of Mr. Levine with Elaine Kaufman, who died in 2010. Ms. Kaufman’s restaurant, Elaine’s, lay just a few blocks from Mr. Levine’s apartment on the Upper East Side, and he was a regular there, along with media luminaries such as David Halberstam, Pete Hamill, Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe.
In Mr. Levine’s bedroom, the walls were lined with framed articles about him and The Enquirer — many of them glowing — from mainstream news outlets including New York, Talk and The New York Times.
“Two in one year,” he said.
Several times during our 90-minute conversation, he mentioned that The Enquirer’s articles on Mr. Edwards had earned a Pulitzer Prize nomination. And just in case I had missed it, there was a framed drawing on yellow construction paper by his daughter that said in big black letters: “Pulitzer Prize Finalist.”
Never mind that Mr. Levine was stretching the truth, which was that the Pulitzer board had determined in 2010 that The Enquirer was merely eligible to submit its articles for consideration. The publication received no nominations in the end.
Ah, well. Who can blame a tabloid journalist for a little embellishment?
Mr. Levine, who grew up in Levittown, Penn., became besotted with journalism as a child when he would gaze at the famous faces — Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor, John Lennon — on the covers of the magazines scattered across his parents’ coffee table.
At Temple University, he edited the student paper, The Temple News, and mimicked guys like the street-tough columnist Jimmy Breslin by puffing on cigars and sneaking into bars while still under the legal drinking age. He figured that if he was brave enough to enter, bartenders would serve him.
And did they?
“Of course.”
In 1976, during his freshman year, the first “King Kong” remake came out to much hype, and Mr. Levine hatched an idea for his first episode in stunt journalism: “Me and my buddies called the local papers to say l was going to climb city hall in a gorilla suit.”
After an evening spent in a tavern, Mr. Levine stepped into the costume, only to find he was in no shape to scale a building. Nevertheless, he got his picture in The Philadelphia Daily News the next day.
As a college senior, he worked nights as an office assistant at The Associated Press. From there he put in stints as a reporter at The Syracuse Post-Standard and The Baltimore News-American. It was a time of clanking typewriters, cigar chomping and whiskey, he recalled.
After the News-American folded, Mr. Levine ended up at The Star, a supermarket tabloid whose owner at the time, Rupert Murdoch had positioned it as grittier than People magazine and less antagonistic than The Enquirer.
Mr. Levine recalled accompanying the boxer Mike Tyson to Moscow shortly after his marriage to the actress Robin Givens. At the time she was shooting the ABC sitcom “Head of the Class,” and a plotline involved the students heading to Russia for a debate.
“Their marriage was on the rocks, and Mike was having all kinds of issues,” Mr. Levine said.
Ten days into the trip, the inquisitive reporter found himself at odds with the heavyweight champ.
“Mike dragged me to a stairwell and had me by the arms, and he said, ‘I could throw you over and because you’re American the Russians won’t care,’” Mr. Levine said. “All I could think was, ‘If he doesn’t throw me over, I have a great story.’ The lede was ‘To Russia without love,’ and then I wrote a sidebar, ‘My One-Round Fight With Mike Tyson.’”
In 1991, Mr. Levine headed a team of 15 reporters and photographers who sneaked onto Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch to cover Ms. Taylor’s wedding to the construction worker Larry Fortensky.
The centerpiece of Mr. Levine’s battle plan was the launching of a hot-air balloon, with a reporter and a photographer in the basket. It would float closer to the action than any plane or helicopter and thus would come up with the world’s best aerial shot of Mr. Jackson walking Ms. Taylor down the aisle.
“I hired this fly-by-night team who set up the balloon in this wooded area,” Mr. Levine said. “The winds were terrible, and the reporter Kate Caldwell and the photographer, whose name I forget, got in the basket. It got caught on some trees, which punctured a hole in the balloon and sent it down to earth in slow motion.”
The entrepreneurial zeal shown by Mr. Levine helped land him a job in 1992 as the managing editor of “A Current Affair,” a pioneering tabloid TV show that featured exhaustive coverage of O.J. Simpson’s murder trial and the Long Island shooting of Mary Jo Buttafuoco by Amy Fisher, the mistress of her husband, Joey Buttafuoco.
In 1999, when Mr. Levine landed at The Enquirer as its New York bureau chief, he stated that he would not rest until every limo driver and personal assistant in the city were funneling celebrity dirt to him and his reporters.
Politicians became a regular part of his beat. In 2001, he worked on the story of Jesse Jackson fathering a love child with Karin Stanford, an employee at his nonprofit, the Rainbow Coalition. What’s more, Mr. Levine and his team uncovered evidence that Mr. Jackson had used the organization’s funds to provide her with child support.
If the story seemed sleazy, the financial component gave Mr. Levine the sense he was doing valuable work. So did the fact that The Enquirer was pursuing scoops about Republicans and Democrats alike.
In 2008, Senator John McCain secured the Republication nomination for president and announced that Sarah Palin, then the governor of Alaska, would be his running mate. Days after the announcement, The Enquirer was about to report that the vice-presidential candidate’s teenage daughter was five months pregnant — but Ms. Palin headed off the tabloid’s scoop by announcing the news herself.
At the same time, an Enquirer team was still working the John Edwards “love child” story. When Mr. Edwards visited the baby at the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles, the tabloid’s reporters and photographers confronted him in the lobby. And when he bounded into the men’s room and bolted the door, they hollered questions from the hall.
In the years after that hight point, the supermarket tabloid business deteriorated as the news cycle sped up. Instead of going to war with a new rival, TMZ, or giving Mr. Levine the money to open a Washington bureau (which he was hoping for), Mr. Pecker followed a course of slowing revenue declines by increasing the issue price.
In 2016, Mr. Levine made his exit. “I wanted to write books,” he said. With Monique El-Faizy, he wrote “All the President’s Women,” a 2019 book centered on Mr. Trump’s alleged affairs. One topic not touched on in its pages was Mr. Trump’s dealings with Mr. Pecker and The Enquirer.
Mr. Levine said he wanted to focus on a straightforward account of Mr. Trump’s interactions and relationships with women. Moreover, he said, Ronan Farrow had already revealed details about the arrangement between Mr. Pecker and Mr. Trump in The New Yorker.
But he acknowledged another reason for the omission — the little matter of his own catch-and-kill with his former employer.
“I did sign an N.D.A.,” he said.
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