Okay, drama, but sure. I walked down and she had a guy with her who I had never seen before.
“What’s up?” I said.
“This is Keith Davidson,” she said.
I knew who he was by name, but I’d never met him. He’s a Beverly Hills–based attorney who specializes in claims against celebrities, and also the lawyer who Gina supposedly had gotten to contact The Dirty to get the initial Trump story taken down.
I later learned that Trump’s people had contacted Davidson after learning of the plan to go on Good Morning America. It was Trump’s counsel, Michael Cohen, who reached out to him, he said, offering me $130,000 to not tell my story.
I felt like this was a “win.” I got to stay in my home with my daughter and do the work that I love. I won’t be defined by Donald fucking Trump, and I won’t be branded a gold digger.
And they can’t murder me. And I don’t have to tell Glen!
Keith handed me a seventeen-page nondisclosure agreement and they opened the trunk so I could sign it right there under the light. I had no idea how they had arrived at that price for my silence, and I was too concerned about my safety to even think of wondering why Davidson didn’t push for more. This wasn’t about me being greedy, because if it was I would have sold the story for a million dollars three times already. This was about putting all this behind me confidentially and never having to worry about Trump coming after me or my family.
I just had to break it to Keith and JD that I wasn’t going to talk after all. They were disappointed but seemed to understand.
In the meantime, I went back home to where I live in Texas and I waited for the money. It said in the contract they had seven days to wire me the money, so every day I would check my balance, wondering if that was the day I’d get paid. And on the seventh day, I freaked out.
I knew just what a creep Donald Trump is. He would wait until after the election and then just not pay me. If he lost, nobody would care that he had sex with me. If he won, he’d be the president of the United States and could drop a nuclear bomb on me if he wanted.
They later sent me a new contract because the first one had been breached for their failure to pay, but I was alone in Texas. I took it to the notary near my house. If there weren’t already enough problems, the notary stamped it but didn’t sign or date it. She also notarized a blank signature line.
Ten days before the election, Cohen wired the $130,000 to Davidson, who then took out his and Gina’s share. He then wired the balance of eighty grand and change to Glen’s account, not mine, so if anybody looked at my bank records there would be no red flags.
And I finally told Glen. Well, I told him some of it.
“Look, I am getting this money from Donald Trump because I was in a hotel with him,” I said. “Nothing happened, but his wife would get mad, and having dinner with a porn star would look bad.”
He believed me. I had never lied to him before, so it didn’t occur to him to question it. He trusted me, and I have to live with that. He also believed me because eighty thousand dollars is just such a perfect amount, a ludicrous number for what really happened. People can say I am a gold digger and a liar, but I signed something giving me a paltry amount when I could have made millions of dollars. I am not that stupid. I just wanted it to stop. I used the money to buy a new horse trailer, and I thought that was the end of it.
Four days before the election, The Wall Street Journal ran a story about the National Enquirer paying former Playmate Karen McDougal $150,000 to tell her story about an affair with Trump, and then not running it. She’d had a ten-month relationship with Trump starting in 2006, the same year I met him. Welcome to the shitty club, sister. Her description of their “dates” sounds a lot like mine—a meet-up in Lake Tahoe, beauty pageants, and those damn steaks at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Except the poor thing had sex with him multiple times. Karen said that when she turned down his offer of money after their first encounter, he told her, “You are special.”
The WSJ reporters quoted sources who said the National Enquirer did a “catch and kill,” where they buy the story but bury it so it stays secret. David Pecker, the CEO and chairman of National Enquirer publisher American Media, Inc., has called Trump “a personal friend.” Later, The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow would get McDougal on the record talking about what a terrible deal she got. The National Enquirer had her locked down so that if she breathed a word about Trump to anyone, she would be sued for $150,000 in damages.
And guess who her lawyer was on this terrible deal? Say it with me: Keith Davidson. According to her account in The New Yorker, McDougal had a friend, John Crawford, who suggested she talk, and she gave him permission to pursue it after someone started blabbing about it on social media. Like me, she didn’t want someone else profiting off her story and getting the facts wrong. Crawford called someone involved in the adult film industry—let’s go with the alias Deep Throat—who then called Davidson. The New Yorker published excerpts of an August 2016 email exchange that sounded a lot like my interactions with Davidson. When McDougal asked about some of the fine print, he encouraged her to just sign the deal. “If you deny, you are safe” was his reply. “We really do need to get this signed and wrapped up….”
By the way, according to The New Yorker, Karen also got screwed when Crawford, Deep Throat, and Davidson each took their cut, dropping her check by 45 percent. She walked away with just $82,500.
I didn’t vote on Election Day because I couldn’t decide between Clinton and Trump. So, if you think I am some sort of Deep State Clinton operative, I am sorry to disappoint you.
And then the motherfucker won.
That night, when Trump won, my gay dads lost their shit on me.
“How could you do this to us?” JD texted me. “You could have stopped him.”
I disagreed and I stand by it. This is a guy who bragged on tape about assaulting women. Me saying I slept with him would just be another consensual notch on his belt that his fans could pat him on the back about. Look what happened to Karen McDougaclass="underline" everyone knew she had sex with him and it didn’t make one bit of difference except, well, now everyone knows she had sex with him.
JD was scared that night. He said they were probably not going to be able to get married. “You don’t love us,” he said. Keith, a man who I hadn’t had a single disagreement with in twenty years, chimed in. “You’re dead to us. Don’t ever talk to us again.”
That’s when I started crying. Keith’s words gutted me. They are family to me—and now I truly felt disowned. I put the phone down. I knew they were wrong, but still, some part of me felt I had failed them. I was so afraid of my family paying a price for me talking, and now I’d lost them because of my silence.
NINE
For a whole year, everything was calm. Well, as calm as my life ever is. I remember 2017 as pretty damn magical. I had been so stressed about all the Trump stuff that I was able to appreciate the weight being lifted. There is a specific moment I remember from Christmas Eve: We were at home, all of us in our pajamas. My daughter and I made cookies and she left them out for Santa. As I write this, she is still that perfect age of seven, when you are so freaking smart, but you still believe in things. She was so excited, and I looked at Glen.
“What?” he asked.
“I’m happy,” I said, embarrassed at being so cheesy. “Fuck off, I’m happy.”
We all were. Even my gay dads JD and Keith came around. We agreed Election Night was tough, but we were going to leave it behind us.
Then, on January 9, 2018, I got a text from Gina. “There’s some rumblings. Don’t say anything.”
I hadn’t heard from her in an entire year. It was strange, but I figured nothing would come of it. I certainly wasn’t going to say anything. The following morning, I got a call from Keith Davidson. I was not going to talk to him, but he sounded weird in his voice mail.
I later learned that Michael Cohen had called and wanted a statement signed because he claimed the press was all over the story.
I read it and it was pretty soft. It began, “I recently became aware that certain news outlets are alleging that I had a sexual and/or romantic affair with Donald Trump many, many, many years ago.” Well, I wouldn’t call what we had an affair, but I guess that’s not a lie. But I didn’t see any news outlets saying anything. In fact, I was so panicked about a story being out there that I immediately googled every variation of my name and Trump’s that I could think of, scouring the internet and coming up with nothing. What was Cohen even talking about?
The end of the statement was actually kind of cheeky and sounded like me. “If indeed I did have a relationship with Donald Trump,” it read, “trust me, you wouldn’t be reading about it in the news, you would be reading about it in my book.”
I signed it, sent it back. And nothing happened. I had no idea that it was one of my last days of true freedom.