- Prosecutors in Donald Trump's criminal case have said that Melania Trump became pregnant during her affair with Karen McDougal.
- Two sources told Business Insider that the affair actually began after Melania gave birth to Barron.
- The timeline discrepancies remained a mystery even after the trial ended last month.
Donald Trump's hush-money criminal trial has given the public some unwanted details about the former president's sex life, but after weeks of testimony, one mystery remains.
According to one of the prosecutors in the case, Trump had an affair with former Playboy model Karen McDougal while his wife Melania was pregnant.
The allegation that McDougal had an affair with Trump is not new, but the idea that the affair occurred while Melania was pregnant with his child has never been reported before, Assistant District Attorney Joshua Steinglass revealed during a hearing on the morning of April 15, just before jury selection was to begin.
And he said that detail bolsters prosecutors' case that Trump silenced the women to gain an advantage in the 2016 presidential election.
“The fact that this relationship took place during the defendant's wife's pregnancy and after the birth of their child speaks directly to how damaging the defendant believed this reporting would be to his campaign,” Steinglass told the judge.
Two sources with knowledge of McDougal's relationship with Trump said prosecutors got the details wrong.
“We were as surprised as everyone was when Josh Steinglass mentioned that Melania was pregnant at the time,” McDougal's representative, Carol Heller, told Business Insider.
A second source familiar with Trump and McDougal's affair, who testified at the trial, confirmed that the relationship began “shortly after the baby was born.”
Steinglass revealed the shocking news on the first day of the trial, the same day that journalists flooded into a chilly Manhattan courtroom before a single juror had been selected.
He asked New York State Supreme Court Justice Juan Marchan to allow McDougal to testify.
“Karen McDougal is a former Playboy model who alleges that she had a romantic and sexual relationship with Mr. Trump for nearly a year, including while his wife, Melania, was pregnant with his child,” Steinglass told the judge.
But something doesn't add up.
McDougal has said in previous media interviews that the affair began around Trump's birthday in June 2006 and lasted for 10 months, until April 2007.
Donald and Melania Trump's only child, Barron Trump, was born in March 2006, before McDougal's alleged affair took place.
Heller said Judge Marchan based his ruling on Judge Steinglass' error when he ruled that prosecutors should not question McDougal about the incident on the witness stand.
Judge Steinglass had told the judge he would not elicit “salacious details of the affair, the sexual acts or the location of the relationship” from McDougal unless Trump's legal team “opened the door”. But he said in his ruling that it would be “prejudicial” to bring up the fact that “defendant's wife was pregnant with his child at the time and continued to do so throughout her pregnancy and after the birth”.
“During the course of their affair, Mr Steinglass falsely stated that Melania was pregnant, and Mr Marchan created the false impression when he stated that Melania was pregnant,” Heller told BI.
“As everyone has previously reported, including Karen herself, she met Mr. Trump at the Playboy Mansion while filming 'The Apprentice,'” Heller said. “This was in June 2006, when Barron was already three months old.”
Because the prosecution never called McDougal to testify, the timeline inconsistency was never revisited or further scrutinized at trial, and the jury never heard any evidence about it anyway.
In the end, that detail proved irrelevant to winning the case.
The Manhattan District Attorney's Office charged Trump with 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, another woman who claims to have had an affair with Trump, in order to illegally keep information secret ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
Steinglass reeled off a dizzying array of dates and other details during his marathon, five-hour closing argument.
The jury found Trump guilty on all 34 charges.
McDougall's story helped explain “catch and kill”
While Trump has generally bragged about his affairs in the past, he has rarely spoken publicly about McDougal specifically.
At a court hearing in April, Trump's lead lawyer, Todd Branche, said McDougal's story was “unproven” but did not offer details about her claims.
Neither Blanche nor representatives for Melania Trump responded to requests for comment on the matter.
“Until Trump himself admits to the affair or a witness that Trump previously trusted comes forward and corroborates his admission, I believe Blanche can legally claim the affair was 'unproven,'” Heller told the Business Interest. “Karen will always maintain that it is true, because it is true.”
Daniels received $130,000 in hush money in October 2016. The allegations of an affair with McDougal were the subject of hush money negotiations in June of that year.
McDougal's $150,000 hush money was not the subject of criminal charges, but it helped prosecutors explain the “catch-and-kill” arrangement between Trump, publisher of the tabloid National Enquirer, and people who claim to have compromising information about Trump.
McDougal has said in media interviews that she met Trump when NBC filmed an episode of “The Apprentice” at the Playboy Mansion in June 2006. (The two also appeared in a soft-core Playboy film in 2000.) According to McDougal, the two met for dinner in Los Angeles a week later, around the time of Trump's 60th birthday.
According to “The Fixers,” a book by journalists Joe Palazzolo and Michael Rothfeld that reported on the “capture and kill” arrangement involving Trump, McDougal and Daniels, after dinner and before the two had sex, McDougal asked Trump if he wanted to name their then-3-month-old son Barron.
The idea that Trump was having an affair while Melania was pregnant may have stemmed from text messages from talent agent Gina Rodriguez, Daniels' former agent.
In an October 2016 text message to Dylan Howard, then the editor-in-chief of the National Enquirer, Rodriguez said Daniels would “take a lie detector test and speak publicly” about the affair, which took place while Melania was pregnant.
“Donald Trump had sex with Stormy Daniels while his now-wife was pregnant,” Rodriguez wrote in the text message. “He invited Stormy to compete in a contest and said he would have her appear on Celebrity Apprentice, but that never happened.”
But that doesn't seem to be true either.
According to Stormy Daniels' trial testimony, she met Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe in July 2006, a few months after Barron Trump was born.
Rodriguez did not respond to a request for comment.
According to “The Fixers,” Trump met McDougal again during the event and slept with her, and the timelines of the two affairs overlapped, with Daniels testifying that McDougal attended subsequent events to which Trump was invited.
Ms McDougal's allegations first came to the attention of Michael Cohen, Trump's personal lawyer and fixer, in 2015. When Cohen brought up the allegations between her and Trump, Mr Trump did not deny them, he testified at his trial.
“She's absolutely beautiful,” Trump said, according to Cohen's testimony.
McDougal said in a statement on May 17 that the details of her experience will be “revealed on my own terms and at a time of my choosing.” She was responding to CNN's re-airing of a 2018 interview with Anderson Cooper in which she spoke publicly about the circumstances of her affair for the first time.
“What hasn't changed is the truth I've always told you,” McDougall said.
In her interview with Cooper, McDougal expressed guilt over her relationship with Trump because he was married.
“I was having fun then, which is different,” she says. “I was in the Playboy world. I was just enjoying life to the fullest.”
But a spark was lit, she said.
“There was a real relationship there. There was real emotion between the two of us,” she said. “It wasn't just me, it wasn't just him. There was a real relationship there.”
