Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Michael Cohen Secretly Taped Trump Discussing Payment To Playboy Model

Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal lawyer, secretly recorded a conversation with Trump two months before the presidential election, in which they discussed payments to a former Playboy model who said she had an affair with Trump, according to lawyers and others familiar with the recording.

The F.B.I. seized the recording this year during a raid on Cohen’s office, the New York Times reported Friday. The Justice Department is investigating Cohen’s involvement in paying women to dilute embarrassing news stories about Trump ahead of the 2016 election. Prosecutors want to know whether that violated federal campaign finance laws.

Rudolph Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, confirmed in a phone call to the Times on Friday that Trump had discussed the payments with Cohen on the tape; however, he said the payment was ultimately never made. He said the recording was less than two minutes and demonstrated that the president had done nothing wrong.

“In the big scheme of things, it’s powerful exculpatory evidence,” Giuliani said.

The former model, Karen McDougal, says she began a nearly yearlong affair with Trump in 2006, shortly after Mr. Trump’s wife, Melania, gave birth to their son Barron. McDougal sold her story to The National Enquirer for $150,000 during the final months of the presidential campaign, but the tabloid sat on the story, which kept it from becoming public.

Cohen, who is Jewish, grew up in Long Island. His father is a Holocaust survivor, and he is married to Ukrainian immigrant Laura Shusterman.

Alyssa Fisher is a news writer at the Forward. Email her at [email protected], or follow her on Twitter at @alyssalfisher

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.