Donald Trump’s criminal hush-money trial 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. The idea that the affair took place while Melania Trump was expecting a child, however, had never been previously reported. The prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Joshua Steinglass, disclosed it at a hearing just before jury selection began, on the morning of April 15.
And it was that detail that would bolster the prosecution’s argument that Trump silenced women to benefit 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 got the detail wrong.
“We were just as surprised as you when Josh Steinglass stated that Melania was pregnant at the time,” Carol Heller, a representative for McDougal, told Business Insider.
A second source with knowledge of the trysts between Trump and McDougal, and who testified in the trial, confirmed the relationship began “soon after the birth.”
Steinglass dropped the apparent bombshell on the very first day journalists flooded the chilly Manhattan courtroom for the trial, before a single juror had been selected.
He asked the judge, New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, to allow McDougal to 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,” Assistant District Attorney Steinglass told the judge.
But something didn’t add up.
In previous media interviews, McDougal said the affair spanned 10 months, beginning around Trump’s birthday in June 2006 and lasting until April 2007.
Barron Trump, the sole 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’s error when he ruled prosecutors should not question McDougal about the subject on the witness stand.
Steinglass had told the judge he would not elicit “the salacious details of the affair, to describe the sexual acts or locales of their liaisons” from McDougal — unless Trump’s lawyers would “open the door” to it. But the judge, in his ruling, said it would be “prejudicial” to bring up “the defendant’s wife was pregnant with a child at the time, and that this went on while she was pregnant and even after she gave birth.”
“Steinglass misspoke about Melania being pregnant during the affair, and Merchan relied on the incorrect impression he gave when he talked about Melania being 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 of 2006. Barron was already three months old.”
Prosecutors ultimately never called McDougal to testify, so the timeline discrepancy wasn’t raised again and didn’t become the subject of further scrutiny in the trial. Jurors never heard any evidence about it either way.
The detail ultimately proved inconsequential to winning the case.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office charged Trump with 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels — a different woman who says she had an affair with him — to unlawfully keep the information secret ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
Steinglass marshaled an almost-dizzying matrix of dates and other details in a marathon five-hour closing argument.
The jury convicted Trump of all 34 counts.
McDougal’s story helped explain ‘catch and kill’
In the past, Trump has boasted about his infidelity in general terms, but has seldom publicly talked about McDougal in particular.
In the April court hearing, Trump’s lead defense attorney, Todd Blanche, called McDougal’s story “unproven” but did not discuss 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 affair, or until any witness in whom he has previously confided comes forward to verify his admission, I suppose Mr. Blanche can legally describe their affair as ‘unproven,'” Heller told BI. “Karen will always hold 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 an earlier hush-money arrangement, in June of that year.
McDougal’s $150,000 in hush money wasn’t the subject of any criminal charges, but it helped prosecutors explain the “catch and kill” arrangements 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 participated in a softcore Playboy movie released in 2000.) The two had dinner a week later in Los Angeles, around Trump’s 60th birthday, McDougal has said.
Before the two had sex after the dinner, McDougal asked Trump about naming his then-3-month-old son Barron, according to “The Fixers,” a book by journalists Joe Palazzolo and Michael Rothfeld, who broke the stories about the “catch and kill” arrangements 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 then served as the editor-in-chief of the National Enquirer, Rodriguez said Daniels would “take a lie detector and go on the record” about the affair taking 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 would get her on Celebrity Apprentice which he never did.”
But that doesn’t appear to be true, either.
According to trial testimony from Stormy Daniels, she met Trump at a Lake Tahoe celebrity golf tournament in July of 2006 — months after Barron Trump was born.
Rodriguez didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Trump also met and slept with McDougal again during the event, according to “The Fixers.” And the timeline for both affairs overlapped. According to Daniels’ testimony, McDougal even also showed up at subsequent events Trump invited her to.
McDougal’s claims first came to the attention of Michael Cohen — who then served as Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer — in 2015. When Cohen raised her story of an affair with Trump, he didn’t deny it, Cohen testified in the trial.
“She’s really beautiful,” Trump remarked, according to Cohen’s testimony.
In a May 17 statement, McDougal said details of her experience remained “to be disclosed on my own terms, at a time of my own choosing.” She was responding to CNN re-running a 2018 interview she gave to Anderson Cooper, where she first publicly laid out the timeline of the affair.
“What has not changed is the truth that I have always told,” McDougal said.
In the interview with Cooper, McDougal expressed guilt about her relationship with Trump, since he was married.
“Back in that day, I was 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 real — there were feelings between the two of us,” she said. “Not just myself, not just him. There was a real relationship there.”
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