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.
