LOS ANGELES—Michael Cohen, the former Donald Trump lawyer and “fixer” who has admitted arranging a $130,000 “hush money” payment to AVN Hall of Famer Stormy Daniels toward the end of the 2016 presidential campaign, now says he owes Daniels an apology. Cohen, who is promoting his new memoir Disloyal appeared Monday on the ABC talk program The View.
Cohen was sentenced to three years in federal prison after pleading guilty to campaign finance violations over the “hush money” payment, which he paid out of his own pocket though he was later reimbursed by Trump. In his federal guilty plea, as well as in congressional testimony and his new book, Cohen says that he made the payoff — to silence Daniels over a sexual encounter with the married Trump 10 years earlier — entirely at Trump’s direction.
Cohen was released from prison earlier this year due to concerns over COVID-19 in prison, but he remains under home confinement.
During the media firestorm over Daniels’ lawsuit against Cohen and Trump in 2018, seeking to be released from the “hush” agreement, Cohen made several disparaging remarks about Daniels. In one instance, he taunted her publicly, saying that after he and Trump prevailed in the lawsuit, he planned to “take an extended vacation on her dime.”
“You were horrible to her. You taunted her in the press,” View co-host Meghan McCain said to Cohen during the Monday program. “This is a woman I think has been mistreated by the media and did nothing wrong. Don’t you think you owe her an apology?"
“The answer is yes,” Cohen replied. “I owe her and the country an apology for what I did. I also owe the First Lady an apology for lying to her. But I did it all at the direction of and for the benefit of Donald J. Trump.”
Trump has never publicly admitted the sexual episode with Daniels, which allegedly took place in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, during the July 2006 American Century Celebrity Golf Championship. In Disloyal Cohen states flatly that Daniels’ “allegations were true.” However, in the book, Cohen also refers to Daniels as “a lowlife porn star,” and describes her as “pretty in a vah-voom kind of way, but not exactly a study in classy restraint and style.”
On The View appearance, as well as in the book, Cohen emphasizes that he never met or even spoke with Daniels, communicating only through her then-attorney, Keith Davidson.
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