‘National Enquirer’ May Have Shredded Its Files on Karen McDougal

Just days before the 2016 presidential election, a reporter from The Wall Street Journal made a phone call to the headquarters of the National Enquirer newspaper, asking for comment on a story the WSJ was about to publish. The story alleged that a decade earlier, Donald Trump—then the Republican candidate for president—had a months-long affair with former Playboy centerfold model Karen McDougal, and that the Enquirer helped Trump by paying McDougal $150,000 to keep quiet about it. McDougal later sued the Enquirer over the deal, as AVN.com reported.  But according to the upcoming book Catch and Kill by Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist Ronan Farrow, on the very day that call came into the offices of American Media Incorporated, the tabloid’s parent company, the then-top editor of the Enquirer suddenly ordered documents related to Trump shredded, according to a report on the book, published by Politico. The documents containing sensitive information on Trump were held in a top-secret safe inside the Enquirer offices. When the call from the Journal came in, Enquirer Editor-in-Chief Dylan Howard ordered his underlings to “get everything out of the safe,” and demanded, “We need to get a shredder down there,” according to Farrow’s reporting. The Wall Street Journal published its story on November 4, 2016, just four days before the election. “The staffer opened the safe, removed a set of documents, and tried to wrest it shut,” Farrow writes in the book.  “Later, reporters would discuss the safe like it was the warehouse where they stored the Ark of the Covenant in Indiana Jones, but it was small and cheap and old.” Howard also ordered employees to compile a list of the Enquirer’s Trump documents. But later, when the staffers compared the list to the actual documents in the paper’s possession, they noticed that a number of the documents were missing, according to Farrow’s reporting. In a Twitter post on Monday, Farrow said that he had gained access to that list—the first time any reporter had done so. According to a CNN report on the book, which is set to be released today, AMI has called Farrow’s account of the Trump-related document-shredding "completely untrue." Farrow acknowledges in the book that Howard maintains “to this day” that no Trump-related documents had been destroyed. Photo By Sam Posten III / Wikimedia Commons