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A prosecutor in Donald Trump’s criminal case said Melania was pregnant during his affair with Karen McDougal.
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The affair actually started after Melania gave birth to Barron, two sources told Business Insider.
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The difference in the timeline remained a lingering mystery after the trial ended last month.
The criminal hush money trial of Donald Trump has given the public more details than anyone wanted about the former president’s sex life. But after weeks of testimony, one mystery lingered.
According to one of the prosecutors in the case, Trump had an affair with Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model, while his wife, Melania Trump, was pregnant.
The claim that McDougal and Trump had an affair was not new. However, the idea that the affair took place while Melania Trump was expecting a child had never been previously reported. The prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Joshua Steinglass, made the announcement during a hearing just before jury selection began on the morning of April 15.
And it was that detail that would strengthen the prosecutor’s argument that Trump silenced women for the benefit of his 2016 presidential campaign, he said.
“The fact that this relationship occurred during the defendant’s wife’s pregnancy and after the birth of their child speaks directly to the extent to which the defendant believed the story would be damaging to his campaign,” Steinglass told the judge.
According to two sources with knowledge of McDougal’s relationship with Trump, the prosecutor misunderstood the details.
“We were as surprised as you were when Josh Steinglass stated that Melania was pregnant at the time,” Carol Heller, a rep for McDougal, told Business Insider.
A second source with knowledge of the meetings between Trump and McDougal, and who testified at the trial, confirmed that the relationship began “shortly after birth.”
Steinglass dropped the apparent bombshell on the very first day reporters flooded the chilly Manhattan courtroom for the trial, before a single juror had been chosen.
He asked the judge, New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, to let McDougal testify about it.
“Karen McDougal is a former Playboy model who claimed to have had a romantic and sexual relationship with Mr. Trump that lasted nearly a year, including while Mr. Trump’s wife, Melania, was pregnant with their child,” said aide -Prosecutor Steinglass to the judge.
But something wasn’t right.
In previous media interviews, McDougal said the affair lasted ten months, starting around Trump’s birthday in June 2006 and lasting until April 2007.
Barron Trump, the only child of Donald and Melania Trump, was born in March 2006 – before McDougal says the affair took place.
According to Heller, Merchan relied on Steinglass’ error when he ruled that prosecutors could not question McDougal about the subject on the witness stand.
Steinglass had told the judge he would not elicit from McDougal “the salacious details of the affair, to describe the sexual acts or the locations of their liaisons” — unless Trump’s lawyers “opened the door to it.” But the judge said in his ruling that it would be “prejudicial” to bring up “the defendant’s wife was pregnant with a child at the time, and that this continued while she was pregnant and even after she gave birth.”
“Steinglass had made a mistake about Melania’s pregnancy during the affair, and Merchan relied on the false impression he created when he told Melania was pregnant,” Heller told BI.
“As everyone has previously reported, including Karen herself, Karen met Mr. Trump at the Playboy Mansion when they were filming an episode of The Apprentice,” Heller said. “This was June 2006. Barron was already three months old.”
Prosecutors ultimately never called McDougal to testify, so the timeline discrepancy was not brought up again and did not become the subject of further investigation in the trial. Jurors never heard any evidence about it anyway.
The detail ultimately turned out not to be important to winning the case.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has charged Trump with 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment to Stormy Daniels — another woman who says she had an affair with him — to unlawfully keep the information secret prior to the 2016 presidential elections. .
Steinglass assembled an almost dizzying array of data and other details in a five-hour closing argument.
The jury convicted Trump of all 34 charges.
McDougal’s story helped explain ‘capture and kill’
In the past, Trump has boasted about his disloyalty in general terms, but has rarely spoken publicly about McDougal in particular.
During the April hearing, Trump’s lead attorney, Todd Blanche, called McDougal’s story “unproven” but did not elaborate on the details of her claims.
Neither Blanche nor representatives for Melania Trump responded to requests for comment for this story.
“Until Mr. Trump himself confirms their case, or until a witness he previously confided in comes forward to verify his confession, I think Mr. Blanche can legally describe their case as ‘unproven,’” Heller told to BI. “Karen will always take it as the truth, because it is.”
Daniels received $130,000 in hush money in October 2016. The alleged affair with McDougal was the subject of a previous hush-money settlement, in June of that year.
McDougal’s $150,000 in hush money was not the subject of any criminal charges, but it helped prosecutors explain the “catch and kill” schemes between Trump, the publisher of the National Enquirer tabloid, and people who claimed to have unsavory information about him .
In media interviews, McDougal has said she met Trump when NBC filmed an episode of “The Apprentice” at the Playboy Mansion in June 2006. (They also both took part in a softcore Playboy film released in 2000.) The two had dinner a week later. in Los Angeles around Trump’s 60th birthday, McDougal said.
Before the two had sex after dinner, McDougal asked Trump what he would name his then-three-month-old son Barron, according to “The Fixers,” a book by journalists Joe Palazzolo and Michael Rothfeld, who broke the stories of the “capture.” brought outside. and kill” schemes involving Trump, McDougal and Daniels.
The idea that Trump had an affair while Melania Trump was pregnant may have originated from a text message from Gina Rodriquez, a talent agent who previously represented Daniels.
In an October 2016 text message to Dylan Howard, who was then editor-in-chief of the National Enquirer, Rodriguez said Daniels would “take a polygraph and stay informed” about the affair that took place while Melania was pregnant.
“Donald Trump had sex with Stormy Daniels while his current wife was pregnant,” Rodriguez wrote in the text message. “He flew Stormy to his pageant and told her he was going to get her on Celebrity Apprentice, which he never did.”
But that turns out not to be true either.
According to Stormy Daniels’ testimony, she met Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe in July 2006 — months after Barron Trump was born.
Rodriguez did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump also met and slept with McDougal again at the event, according to “The Fixers.” And the timeline for both cases overlapped. According to Daniels’ testimony, McDougal even appeared at subsequent events to which Trump invited her.
McDougal’s claims first came to the attention of Michael Cohen — who was Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer at the time — in 2015. When Cohen brought up her story of having an affair with Trump, he did not deny it, Cohen testified during the process.
“She’s really beautiful,” Trump noted, according to Cohen’s testimony.
In a May 17 statement, McDougal said details of her experience had yet to be “made public on my own terms, at a time of my choosing.” She responded to CNN rehashing a 2018 interview she gave to Anderson Cooper in which she publicly detailed the timeline of the affair for the first time.
“What hasn’t changed is the truth I’ve always told,” McDougal said.
In the interview with Cooper, McDougal expressed guilt over her relationship with Trump since he was married.
“I used to be a different girl, I had fun,” she said. “I was in the Playboy scene. I was just enjoying life as much as I could.”
But there was a spark, she said.
“There was a real relationship there. There was a real relationship between the two of us,” she said. ‘Not just me, not just him. There was a real relationship there.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
