Trump New York trial: Karen McDougal won’t take stand after Stormy Daniels testimony
A lawyer for President Donald Trump announced Thursday afternoon that prosecutors no longer plan to bring Playboy model Karen McDougal to testify at his New York criminal hush money trial after two days of testimony from porn star Stormy Daniels.
Trump lawyer Todd Blanche said in court that “we have been informed the People no longer intend to call Karen McDougal as a witness,” according to reports from the trial. It is not immediately clear why prosecutors with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office decided not to bring McDougal to the witness stand.
The decision comes after some legal pundits suggested Daniels’s testimony may have damaged the prosecutors’ case, which aims to show Trump conspired to pay her hush money with the intent of advancing his 2016 campaign.
Daniels’s testimony mostly dealt with salacious claims of a sexual encounter she said she had with Trump at a Lake Tahoe resort in 2006, an incident the former president has denied.
Last week, McDougal posted to X, formerly known as Twitter, an image of herself sitting in her bathtub with the book Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow situated between a wine glass and a lit candle. Bragg has called Trump’s alleged efforts to pay tabloid publishers to silence damaging stories about him a “catch-and-kill” scheme that was meant to influence the 2016 campaign.
While former Trump attorney Michael Cohen‘s $130,000 payment to Daniels serves as the case’s primary focus, prosecutors have described two other deals involving Trump, including one with McDougal and another with a former Trump Tower doorman, who created a fake story that the then-presidential candidate had fathered a child out of wedlock.
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Blanche’s announcement that McDougal would no longer take the stand comes as the defense is asking both for a mistrial and that Trump be allowed to respond to Daniels’s comments about him in court.
Judge Juan Merchan will have to decide whether to grant a mistrial or to allow Trump to respond, given his gag order prevents him from talking about witnesses. Merchan previously declined Trump’s first mistrial request on Tuesday.
