During the past several weeks we’ve watched mushrooming legal disputes involving Trump and a number of women that he either had affairs with or defamed.
You can’t make it up.
First there was the affair with the porn movie actress, Stormy Daniels.
Next came the affair with a Playboy centerfold and model named Karen McDougal.
This week, a New York State court ruled that a defamation action brought by a woman named, Summer Zervos, a former contestant on Trump’s reality television show, The Apprentice.
The facts underlying each of these disputes are fairly straight forward.
It is the legal machinations involving them that make them interesting.
In the Daniels case, she alleges that she had an affair with Trump in 2006.
She contends that Trump wined, dined and promised her an apartment and a place on the Apprentice.
In the Daniels case it appears that within days of the 2016 election, Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, arranged a payoff to Daniels in the amount of $ 130,000 to keep her quiet.
Cohen went to the trouble of forming a Delaware Limited Liability Corporation (LLC) whose sole purpose, it appears, was to serve as a vehicle to launder the payoff money through.
In exchange for the payoff, Daniels had to sign a Non- Disclosure Agreement (NDA) in which she had to refrain from ever discussing her relationship with Trump or providing any details about the affair including photographs and paternity information.
The agreement that was prepared by Cohen had an alias for Trump and an alias for Daniels which each was supposed to sign.
It was apparently signed by Daniels using the alias but not Trump, which has led Daniels to declare that it isn’t valid.
Cohen, moreover, claims that the money used to pay off Daniels came from Cohen’s home equity loan, not from Trump or the Trump Organization and that Trump had no involvement in the negotiations.
If that scenario is true, Cohen could find himself facing disciplinary proceedings in New York for ethical canon violations.
On top of that, the money paid could be viewed as an undisclosed and illegal campaign contribution designed to effect the outcome of the election since it came so close to the 2016 Election Day.
Trump’s attorney, Cohen, has attempted to drag the dispute into arbitration which would get it behind closed doors and out of the public’s view.
In doing so, he removed Daniel’s lawsuit from California State court to the Federal court there.
In order to do so, he had to file an affidavit from Trump revealing that he is the party in the case, which would seem to put an end to trump’s claim that he was not involved with Daniels and not the party to the NDA.
If the point was to shield Trump from this controversy, Cohen hasn’t accomplished much.
What makes the matter screwier is that Daniels gave an interview to a magazine years ago in which she disclosed her affair with Trump in some detail.
Last night, Daniels gave an interview to 60 Minutes in which she disclosed that she had a single sexual encounter with Trump.
Considering Trump’s history it seemed like an underwhelming revelation.
Thus the question becomes what is there currently to hide?
The legal wrangling in the Karen McDougal case is just as strange.
McDougal claims that she had an affair with Trump at about the same time as Daniels and that he made many of the same promises to her that he made to Daniels, an apartment, gifts etc.
In May 2016 during the election campaign, the affair was reported on social media and she decided to sell it to America Media Inc. (AMI) for $ 150,000.
AMI is the publisher of that journalistic gem, the National Enquirer.
Once AMI acquired the exclusive right the story, it promptly buried it, a practice known as “catch and kill.”
Why would AMI and more pointedly the National Enquirer spend $ 150,000 to bury the story?
It turns out that AMI’s chief executive, David J. Pecker, is a friend of Trump’s.
AMI contends it killed the story because it couldn’t verify some of McDougal’s claims after consulting with none other than Michael Cohen, Trump’s attorney.
Sumner Zervos, a contestant on Trump’s reality television show The Apprentice, is one of the ten women who came forward during the campaign to report that Trump had sexually harassing her.
Trump, it will be remembered, declared that all of the women were liars and would be sued after the election.
While Trump hasn’t sued any of the women, Zervos has sued Trump for calling her a liar.
Trump’s lawyers lost a round in New York State Supreme Court where they tried to argue that Trump was immune from the lawsuit because he was President of the United States.
Alternatively, they argued that the lawsuit should be postponed until after Trump left office.
Their objections were bizarre since their client had brought none other than Paula Jones to the Clinton-Trump debate in 2016.
Jones was the litigant who successfully brought an action against President Bill Clinton for sexually harassing her while he served as Governor of Arkansas before he was President.
The Supreme Court ruled that Clinton was not immune from being sued for something that occurred before he was President and that defending the lawsuit, while he was President was not unduly burdensome.
While being deposed by Jones’s lawyers, Clinton lied about his affair with Monica Lewinsky and, as they say, the rest is history.
This past week a lawyer for the woman accusing failed Alabama Senate candidate of pedophilia came forward to report that two Moore supporters offered him $ 10,000 to drop the woman as a client and declare that he didn’t believe her.
In addition to the money he would be introduced to Steve Bannon.
One circus leaves and another one comes.