The former Fox News reporter who discovered before the 2016 presidential election that Donald Trump had funneled a $130,000 “hush money” payment to AVN Hall of Famer Stormy Daniels, only to see her bosses at Fox spike the story and then demote her, as AVN.com reported, has now handed over documents shedding light on the incident to congressional investigators.
Reports that journalist Diane Falzone (pictured above) had begun cooperating with the House Oversight Committee, whose chair, Democrat Elijah Cuimmings, requested the docunents, first surfaced on MSNBC in Wednesday, MediaIte reported.
“The former Fox reporter who claims that the network spiked her big story on Stormy Daniels, helping Trump basically avoid a bad story during the 2016 election,” said MSNBC host Ari Melber. “Well, that reporter has begun cooperating directly with congressional investigators.”
That Falzone handed over the documents, and presumably will talk to the committee’s investigators as well, is significant because the former Fox reporter is bound by a non-disclosure agreement she signed with Fox as part of a settlement in a lawsuit she filed, accusing the network of discrimination.
But because Congress requested the documents, the NDA is effectively voided, Falzone’s lawyer says.
“The law requires that you be allowed to participate in any government investigation—and no NDA can stop that,” attorney Nancy Erika Smith told MSNBC.
After a New Yorker magazine exposé revealed that Falzone had gathered all of the details in the Trump-Daniels payoff story prior to the election—details that were not publicly reported until a Wall Street Journal story in January of 2018—the editor who killed the story, Ken LaCorte, went public, admitting that he had, in fact, suppressed Falzone’s Daniels reporting.
But LaCorte claimed in a MediaIte essay that Falzone’s reporting was not journalistically solid.
“The story wasn’t close to being publishable, and my decision to hold it was a no-brainer. I didn’t do it to help Trump and never said nor implied otherwise,” LaCorte wrote.
The New Yorker reporting alleged LaCorte informed Falzone that Fox would not run the story because the network’s founder and CEO, billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch, “wants Donald Trump to win. So just let it go.”
Smith told MSNBC that LaCorte’s claim that he shelved Falzone’s story due to journalistic deficiencies was “a lie,” adding, “We’ll see what the evidence shows about how Fox reacted to this story.”
Keith Davidson, the attorney who handled the hush money deal for Daniels, appeared to back up Smith’s account of Falzone’s reporting, telling MSNBC that when the reporter contacted him, “she had the amount, she had the corporate names that the original settlement was named in, she had the dates of the affair and she asked me to confirm those details.”
Photo By Diana Falzone Facebook
