Did Donald Trump secretly father a child out of wedlock in the 1980s and have a friendly media organization pay $30,000 to prevent a former employee from speaking out about it?
Maybe?
The New Yorker—which recently dropped an exposé on how the National Enquirer and its parent company, American Media, Inc., paid to keep a woman from speaking about an affair with Trump—now reports that the media company paid a former Trump doorman to keep quiet about the president’s sex life as well.
Dino Sajudin, a doorman at a Trump building, agreed to tell his story to the Enquirer for $30,000 five months after the president launched his campaign in summer 2015. The most salacious detail he knew: That the president fathered a love child with a California woman in the 1980s.
According to the Associated Press: “Sajudin got $30,000 in exchange for signing over the rights, ‘in perpetuity,’ to a rumor he’d heard about Trump’s sex life—that the president had fathered an illegitimate child with an employee at Trump World Tower, a skyscraper he owns near the United Nations.”
Sajudin told AMI that he’d been told the story from several high-ranking people in the Trump orbit, including Trump’s head of security, Matthew Calamari.
The New Yorker could not verify the daughter in question was Trump’s. The Trump Organization denied the story, and both the mother and daughter in question declined to comment.
Sajudin’s deal included a $1 million fine for speaking out. The Enquirer never published the story. Employees of AMI told the New Yorker they were told to stop investigating after the deal was made.
It marks the second time the company bought and held onto a salacious story about Trump’s sex life.
In February, it was revealed the Enquirer paid Karen McDougal for the rights to her story about an affair with Trump, then kept it from coming out in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election.
You can read the New Yorker story here.