Peter Bart: Trapped In A Circus Of Sleaze, David Pecker Had Looked For An Escape Route

deadline.com:

David Pecker stabbed impatiently at his veal piccata. We’d been having a cordial business lunch, but he was growing frustrated.

The publisher of the National Enquirer was pitching an ambitious deal to me involving major money — not a Stormy Daniels sort of deal — but my disinterest in it puzzled him. “This could be an important journalistic venture,” he said. “That may be true,” I replied, “but I don’t care to be part of it.” We exchanged a friendly handshake and he picked up the tab, but no deal was made.

A decade later, Pecker is wallowing in another journalistic venture, albeit perversely different. The Donald Trump hush-money criminal trial, in which he is a key witness, hinges on a controversial Pecker deal, this one with Trump.

It involves a “catch and kill” genre story — one at which Pecker had become a master. Pecker, having made a deal with prosecutors, testified that he paid for a bogus story from a doorman alleging that Trump had fathered an illegitimate child.