Ex-Fox News editor explains how and why he spiked the Stormy Daniels story weeks before Trump's election

Ken LaCorte, a former editor at Fox News, fired back at New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer on Friday for her portrayal of him in a recent story that recounted his decision to quash a story about Stormy Daniels' alleged affair with Donald Trump in the weeks before the 2016 election.

Mayer's story, revealing the deep and disturbing connections between Fox News and the White House, used the Daniels story incident as evidence of the network's corrupt coverage of the president:

Diana Falzone, who often covered the entertainment industry, had obtained proof that Trump had engaged in a sexual relationship in 2006 with a pornographic film actress calling herself Stormy Daniels. Falzone had worked on the story since March, and by October she had confirmed it with Daniels through her manager at the time, Gina Rodriguez, and with Daniels’s former husband, Mike Moz, who described multiple calls from Trump. Falzone had also amassed e-mails between Daniels’s attorney and Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen, detailing a proposed cash settlement, accompanied by a nondisclosure agreement. Falzone had even seen the contract.

But Falzone’s story didn’t run—it kept being passed off from one editor to the next. After getting one noncommittal answer after another from her editors, Falzone at last heard from LaCorte, who was then the head of FoxNews.com. Falzone told colleagues that LaCorte said to her, “Good reporting, kiddo. But Rupert wants Donald Trump to win. So just let it go.” LaCorte denies telling Falzone this, but one of Falzone’s colleagues confirms having heard her account at the time.

But LaCorte pushed back against the characterization of his decision Friday in an op-ed for Mediaite.

"On October 18, I got my first look at the Stormy Daniels story written by Fox reporter Diana Falzone, who primarily covered celebrity news for print and video," he explained. "It wasn’t a detailed investigative piece as the media has portrayed this week, but a 9-paragraph story that sorely needed backup."

He continued, describing a draft of the story inconsistent with what Mayer recounted:

It included: a two-word confirmation – “it’s true” – from an unnamed Daniels “spokesperson,” an anonymous quote from a friend who said she’d dropped off Daniels to meet Trump at a hotel, and quotes from The Dirty owner, who said that he had spoken to Daniels in 2011 and she had confirmed the affair.

It lacked: any mention of payments, a hush money contract or any corroborating evidence beyond the two secondhand accounts.

On top of that, Stormy Daniels herself had publicly denied the whole thing, a denial she would maintain for another year.

Not publishing the piece was a "no-brainer," he wrote. He said it was an "easy call" — he didn't do it to help Trump, and he didn't tell his superiors about the decision, contradicting Mayer's account.

Mayer pointed out that others have contradicted LaCorte's account:

Nik Richie, a blogger who had broken the first story about Daniels, tweeted, “This is complete bullshit. Ken you are such a LIAR. This story got killed by @FoxNews at the highest level. I know, because I was one of your sources.”

And Mayer also reported that Falzone pitched a piece about a "catch-and-kill" payment by National Enquirer to help Trump, which also went nowhere.

But LaCorte notably pointed out that other outlets, including Slate and the Daily Beast, heard about the Daniels story and didn't run with it. Without the hush money payment aspect, the story would be much less important, and the payment hadn't actually been made until shortly before Election Day. Slate's Jacob Weisberg reported that he had tried to get Daniels to cooperate fully for a story, but she wavered:

[About] a week before the election, Daniels stopped responding to calls and text messages. A friend of hers told me Daniels had said she’d taken the money from Trump after all. I considered publishing the story without her cooperation. After all, she had never said anything was off the record. But if I did so, she would presumably disavow what she had told me, and the only people I had corroborating her story were sources Daniels herself had pointed me to. For the most important aspect of the story—the contract for her silence—I also lacked independent corroboration.

One obscure website, The Smoking Gun, did publish a story on the affair before the election, but it largely went unnoticed. The Wall Street Journal eventually broke the story open more than a year later.

LaCorte tries to argue that that New Yorker piece, and the extent to which the mainstream media has picked it up, shows how deeply biased the American press is. Though she printed his denials, Mayer never interviewed him for the story, he said.

But his account of what happened conflicts with others who were around at the time, and it's not clear who we should believe. More broadly, though, LaCorte doesn't offer a more thorough defense of Fox News, just of his own personal actions. Perhaps he realizes that defending Fox News, which in addition to displaying disturbing fealty to the president also toys with white nationalist rhetoric, is futile. And that's what makes Mayer's account of the death of the Daniels story so plausible.