'I was kidding myself': Lawyer regrets burying Trump’s alleged affairs

08 August

U.S. President Donald Trump delivers remarks on artificial intelligence at the Winning the AI Race Summit in Washington D.C., U.S., July 23, 2025. REUTERS Kent Nishimura

Attorney Cameron Stracher tells the New York Times that he regrets being the lawyer who made two alleged affairs by then-candidate Donald Trump go away.

Stracher was the general counsel for American Media in 2015 when former doorman Dino Sajudin approached The National Enquirer with a story that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump had fathered a child out of wedlock with a woman who had worked for him.

“David Pecker, the publisher of The National Enquirer at the time, authorized payment of $30,000 for Mr. Sajudin’s story — with the intention of not running it,” Stracher said.

The following year a woman named Karen McDougal pitched The National Enquirer news of her affair with Trump. Stracher said Pecker authorized payment of $150,000 to her for that story, which he also did not run.

“I wrote both of those contracts,” said Stracher, adding that he has since “agonized over the role I played.”

“… [W]hat would have happened if The National Enquirer had let Mr. Sajudin and Ms. McDougal take their stories to other news outlets? What would have happened if I had refused to write the contracts?” asked Stracher. “… At the time I believed I had a higher duty to represent my client zealously and to protect the tabloid’s First Amendment rights — which included the right notto publish a story. Now I wonder whether I was kidding myself.”

Had he refused to draft the contracts, Stracher suspects he might have at least delayed the decision to quash the stories, maybe even “thrown a wrench in the gears of The National Enquirer’s pro-Trump propaganda machine.” Pecker probably would have fired him, he admits, but maybe that “small act of resistance would have made him think twice” about the wisdom of his actions

“A lawyer’s job is not to rubber-stamp clients’ decisions; it is to provide our wisest counsel, even when that wisdom advises against the results they want.” said Stracher, who was later fired in 2018 for refusing to write more “catch and kill” contracts for The National Enquirer.

“There are lawyers in the current Trump administration who have refused to take actions they believed were wrong,” Stracher said. “In February, Danielle Sassoon, the interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, quit rather than obey orders to drop the federal corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams. Many other lawyers in the Justice Department have quit or announced plans to quit, including at least 69 of the approximately 110 lawyers in the federal programs branch, which represents the executive branch in civil litigation.”

“Actions like theirs should be taught as a model for ethical conduct at every law school in the country,” said Stracher.

Read the full New York Times report at this link.

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