He was the person behind the hush cash, the amiable Beverly Hills lawyer who specialised in superstar dust — unearthing it, after which, for the best worth, burying it ceaselessly.
However in 2016, the lawyer, Keith Davidson, was on the verge of one thing grander than a run-of-the-mill intercourse tape or affair. He had two shoppers buying tales so huge they may sway a presidential election: Their names have been Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, and so they have been prepared to inform the world about their sexual encounters with Donald J. Trump.
Within the days forward, the Manhattan district lawyer’s workplace will query Mr. Davidson at Mr. Trump’s prison trial in Manhattan, asking him to take jurors behind the scenes to see how Mr. Trump’s allies purchased his shoppers’ silence. Mr. Davidson, who started testifying earlier within the week, is predicted to face questioning concerning the hush-money fee to Ms. Daniels, in addition to its aftermath, when for a time she denied having an affair with Mr. Trump.
On Thursday, after the common midweek break within the trial, prosecutors are anticipated to wrap up their questioning of Mr. Davidson, after which Mr. Trump’s attorneys can have the possibility to cross-examine him.
Already, his hours of testimony opened a uncommon window on the seamy world of superstar hush cash and corroborated key information underpinning the prosecution’s case towards Mr. Trump, the primary American president to face a prison trial.
In an important back-and-forth with prosecutors this week, Mr. Davidson started to tie Mr. Trump to the $130,000 hush-money fee to Ms. Daniels, the porn star whose payoff is on the coronary heart of the case. Though Mr. Trump didn’t pay Ms. Daniels instantly — his fixer, Michael D. Cohen did — Mr. Davidson portrayed Mr. Trump because the hidden hand shaping the machinations.
“Michael Cohen didn’t have the authority to really spend cash,” Mr. Davidson instructed the jury, including, “My understanding was that Mr. Trump was the beneficiary of this contract.”
The testimony punctuated a high-stakes day on Tuesday that started with the choose holding Mr. Trump in contempt, fining the previous president $9,000 for repeatedly violating a gag order and warning that he might go to to jail if he continued to assault witnesses and jurors.
“The courtroom won’t tolerate continued willful violations of its lawful orders,” the choose, Juan M. Merchan, stated in an ominous warning to open the third week of Mr. Trump’s trial. He added that though he was “keenly conscious of, and protecting of, defendant’s First Modification rights,” he would jail Mr. Trump “if needed and acceptable.”
The choose’s crackdown injected instantaneous rigidity into the day’s proceedings earlier than three new witnesses took the stand.
Probably the most vital was Mr. Davidson, who started by recounting his illustration of Ms. McDougal, a Playboy mannequin who stated she’d had an affair with Mr. Trump in 2006.
In a placing stretch of testimony, Mr. Davidson learn aloud for the jury a sequence of off-color textual content exchanges from 2016, telling a Nationwide Enquirer editor that he had a “blockbuster Trump story” about Mr. Trump dishonest on his spouse, Melania Trump, with Ms. McDougal. When a few of Ms. McDougal’s feminine associates urged her to go to ABC Information as a substitute, Mr. Davidson warned that the story may slip away if The Nationwide Enquirer didn’t pay, and quick.
“Time is of the essence,” Mr. Davidson wrote. “The woman is being cornered by the estrogen mafia,” a message that Mr. Davidson, mortified by his years-old remarks, known as “a really unlucky, regrettable textual content” throughout his testimony.
That testimony supplied one other outstanding second in a trial whose early days have been stuffed with them: a former president, the present Republican nominee, watching helplessly as two strangers uncovered particulars of a intercourse scandal that he had fought to maintain secret.
It additionally underscored the array of proof on the prosecution’s disposal because it assembled its case. On Tuesday alone, prosecutors launched stay testimony from Mr. Davidson and three different witnesses, a string of provocative textual content messages, movies of Trump marketing campaign occasions and excerpts from a deposition the previous president gave in a separate case — all woven right into a story that they are saying paints Mr. Trump as a prison.
As Mr. Davidson bought deeper into particulars, his testimony additionally bolstered a key part of the prosecution’s competition that The Enquirer was concerned in a secret plot to spice up Mr. Trump’s candidacy.
The publication purchased Ms. McDougal’s silence for $150,000, however balked at laying out an enormous sum for Ms. Daniels. So the tabloid as a substitute notified Mr. Cohen that Ms. Daniels was buying her story, setting in movement the $130,000 hush-money deal.
Mr. Davidson supplied jurors with an in depth account of negotiations in Ms. Daniels’s case. Though her story of a tryst with Mr. Trump had been floating round for years, he famous that curiosity in it spiked after the emergence of the “Entry Hollywood” tape, on which Mr. Trump bragged about groping girls.
The tape despatched Mr. Trump’s marketing campaign right into a tailspin, but when Ms. Daniels’s story bought out, Mr. Davidson stated, it might have gotten so much worse.
When Mr. Cohen was gradual to pay, Mr. Davidson recalled phoning him to say “it is a very unhealthy scenario,” warning that Ms. Daniels and her agent have been making ready to go public. Mr. Cohen grew to become agitated, noting that “my man” — Mr. Trump — was campaigning in a number of states that day, and “I’m doing every thing I can.”
Ultimately, Mr. Cohen made the fee himself, and Mr. Trump reimbursed him. Prosecutors have charged the previous president, who faces as much as 4 years in jail, with falsifying enterprise data to cowl up that reimbursement.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen had a falling-out years in the past, and their mutual hatred has change into a serious motif of the trial.
Mr. Trump is outwardly not the one one within the courtroom to have robust emotions about Mr. Cohen, who might be a star prosecution witness within the weeks forward. Three totally different witnesses supplied unflattering descriptions of the previous fixer; Mr. Davidson known as him a “jerk” and recalled that when he talked to Mr. Cohen, he was met with a barrage of “insults,” “insinuations” and “allegations.”
Whereas it might sound unusual for prosecutors to elicit such unflattering characterizations of a key witness, they could find yourself working within the prosecution’s favor, desensitizing jurors to Mr. Cohen’s tough edges and making him a memorable and entertaining character of their eyes. It is perhaps working: A couple of jurors flashed smiles as Mr. Davidson used an expletive to explain him.
The Trump-Cohen feud additionally surfaced Tuesday in Justice Merchan’s choice to carry Mr. Trump in contempt, figuring out that the previous president had flouted the gag order by making 9 statements on social media and on his marketing campaign web site wherein he attacked the jury and sure witnesses, together with Mr. Cohen. The choose ordered Mr. Trump to take away the posts by Tuesday afternoon, and he did.
Mr. Trump, who was accompanied in courtroom by a larger-than-usual entourage, together with his son Eric Trump; a marketing campaign adviser, Susie Wiles; and Ken Paxton, the Texas lawyer normal, didn’t instantly react to the choose’s ruling. Throughout a break quickly after, he stood and glowered on the room.
The ruling marked a nadir in relations between the courtroom and Mr. Trump. The previous president has attended day-after-day of the trial, although he has largely been relegated to the sidelines, complaining to cameras afterward concerning the gag order and the choose. Now, with the monetary penalty — and the specter of jail time — his fury might attain a boiling level.
Already, prosecutors have alerted the choose to 4 new potential violations. These weren’t lined by Justice Merchan’s Tuesday order and might be mentioned at one other listening to on Thursday morning.
The choose’s choice and his questioning on the listening to final week took goal at two of Mr. Trump’s typical ways: his tendency to lie and his behavior of suggesting that each motion he takes is political, even when it issues his prison instances.
Justice Merchan for essentially the most half rejected Mr. Trump’s argument that his posts didn’t violate the gag order as a result of they have been responses to political assaults by adversaries who, by coincidence, occur to be potential witnesses.
Mr. Cohen has slammed Mr. Trump on social media, although final week he vowed to “stop posting something about Donald,” a choice he stated he had made “out of respect for Choose Merchan and the prosecutors.”
If Mr. Cohen breaks his silence, he will not be shielded from Mr. Trump’s assaults: The choose, in his Tuesday order, steered that if witnesses provoked Mr. Trump, the previous president is perhaps free to reply.
The gag order, Justice Merchan wrote, can’t “be used as a sword as a substitute of a protect by potential witnesses.”
Except for Mr. Cohen, the opposite potential witness whom Mr. Trump attacked is Ms. Daniels.
The previous president denies that he and Ms. Daniels had intercourse, and in a single put up for which he was fined, he attacked Ms. Daniels on his web site Reality Social, reviving a years-old assertion wherein she denied the affair. Mr. Trump added a remark falsely portraying the assertion as newly found: “LOOK WHAT WAS JUST FOUND! WILL THE FAKE NEWS REPORT IT?”
Mr. Trump failed to notice that the unique assertion was from January 2018 and that Ms. Daniels had recanted it not lengthy afterward.
Throughout final week’s listening to, Justice Merchan centered on Mr. Trump’s lie about when the assertion got here to mild.
“In order that’s not true?” he requested Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Todd Blanche.
“That’s not true,” Mr. Blanche conceded.
In Tuesday’s ruling, Justice Merchan concluded that Mr. Trump might be held accountable for reposting different individuals’s feedback. In one occasion, Mr. Trump had quoted a Fox Information commentator, Jesse Watters, denigrating potential jurors within the case as “undercover liberal activists.”
A day after the put up, one of many jurors begged off the panel.
Justice Merchan imposed the order on Mr. Trump in late March, barring public statements about any witnesses, prosecutors, jurors or courtroom workers, in addition to their households. He expanded it to cowl his personal kinfolk and kinfolk of the district lawyer, Alvin L. Bragg after Mr. Trump discovered a loophole and repeatedly attacked the choose’s daughter, whose firm has executed consulting work for Democratic candidates.
Mr. Trump usually assails individuals he used to reward and commends these he as soon as pilloried.
Simply earlier than Mr. Davidson took the stand on Tuesday, for instance, prosecutors confirmed a video wherein Mr. Trump had praised Mr. Cohen, who had been by his facet for years. He known as him “a really gifted lawyer.”
Reporting was contributed by Maggie Haberman, Kate Christobek, Wesley Parnell, Michael Gold and Jonathan Swan.
