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Hope Hicks, Donald Trump's press secretary in his 2016 run for the presidency, testified at his New York criminal trial on Friday that his campaign was thrown into a frenzy a month ahead of the voting when an old outtake from the celebrity-driven "Access Hollywood" program showed him saying he could grope women with impunity because he was a star.
Hicks, under subpoena to testify against her old boss, said her first, reflexive reaction to the damning tape was to "deny, deny, deny," but when she read a transcript of Trump's remarks, she told the 12-member jury, "I was concerned. Very concerned. Yeah."
She said she knew it was "going to be a massive story."
Hicks said she shared an email from The Washington Post that included the transcript with Trump, and he said his comments about assaulting women "didn't sound like something he would say." But Hicks, after watching the video, later told the newspaper, "It's him."
Prosecutors are alleging that the revelation of the "Access Hollywood" tape plays a pivotal role in their case against the 45th president, showing that he was deeply worried about losing female voters and about how damaging the tape might be in his pursuit of the presidency when he was running against the first major party female candidate, Democrat Hillary Clinton.
But Hicks also said Trump "was concerned about how it would be viewed by his wife," Melania, when The Wall Street Journal published an article just days before the election about two women claiming to have had affairs with Trump and that they were paid large sums of hush money to stay quiet about their claims as voters were headed to the polls.
The defense has attempted to portray Trump as a family man concerned about Melania Trump's feelings as an alternative reason for covering up damaging information, as opposed to how it could affect his chances in the election.
In the days after the emergence of the "Access Hollywood" tape, prosecutors contend that Trump consented to a $130,000 hush money payment to porn film star Stormy Daniels to silence her claim that the two had a one-night tryst a decade before the election.
Not long before, testimony at the trial has shown, the grocery store tabloid National Enquirer paid $150,000 to Karen McDougal, Playboy magazine's 1998 Playmate of the Year, to buy the rights to her claim that she and Trump had a 10-month affair in 2006 and 2007, but with the express purpose of killing the story to help Trump politically.
In the first-ever trial of a former U.S. president, Trump is accused of illegally falsifying business records to hide his former lawyer Michael Cohen's hush money payment to Daniels, to keep the information from voters just before they headed to the polls. Trump has denied both alleged affairs and all 34 charges he is facing.
Prosecutor Matthew Colangelo asked Hicks what she thought of Trump's suggestion to her that Cohen had made the payment to Daniels "out of the kindness of his heart."
Hicks answered that it did not fit with the Cohen she knew, saying she did not consider him to be "an especially charitable person or selfless person."
Over defense objections, she said it would have been out of character for Cohen to have made the payment to Daniels without telling Trump about it.
Under cross-examination, however, she acknowledged to defense lawyer Emil Bove that Cohen "went rogue" at times and did things that were "unauthorized."
She said that Cohen, who has turned against Trump and is expected to be a key witness against him, "liked to call himself a fixer, or Mr. Fix-it, and it was only because he first broke it."
At the outset, Hicks was deferential to Trump, referring to him as "Mr. Trump," and describing his Trump Organization real estate conglomerate as big and successful but run "like a small family business."
But under questioning from prosecutor Matthew Colangelo, Hicks told the jurors how spooked the Trump campaign was about the videotape.
She said the videotape story immediately "dominated coverage" of the campaign. Hicks recalled that a Category 4 hurricane was approaching the U.S. at the time, but for Trump campaign officials, she said, "It was all Trump all the time for the next 36 hours."
Trump at first watched Hicks on the witness stand, and then switched to watching the video feed of her testimony on a monitor. But as Hicks started testifying about McDougal, he shut his eyes. He has often appeared to doze off during the testimony but denied on his Truth Social media platform Thursday that he has fallen asleep.
"I simply close my beautiful blue eyes, sometimes, listen intensely, and take it ALL in!!!" he said.
Prosecutors set up Hicks' testimony with an account from Georgia Longstreet, a paralegal in the prosecutor's office who monitors social media postings. She described, among other aspects of her job, her use of the Wayback Machine, which archives old online postings, including hundreds from Trump.
During her testimony, the defense consented to allow into evidence one of the more memorable - and negative - moments of Trump's 2016 campaign for the White House, a Washington Post article a month ahead of the election about an outtake from the celebrity-driven "Hollywood Access" show in which Trump is caught on tape boasting that he could grab women's genitals because they let him.
The text from the video was read to the jury, but New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan had ruled earlier that the video itself would not be shown to the jurors.
Prosecutors played a Trump video from 2016 after release of the tape about his groping women in which he said, "I've said some foolish things, but there's a big difference between the words and actions of other people," before attacking his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, and her husband, former president Bill Clinton.
The prosecution then showed the jurors a series of Trump's 2016 social media tweets, one of them attacking Senator John McCain, a Republican lawmaker he despised, and another saying he never inappropriately touched two women who claimed he had. The defense had unsuccessfully sought to keep the Twitter postings from being introduced as evidence.
In a Truth Social post from March 2023, Trump, in colorful terms, denied an affair with porn film star Stormy Daniels, a central figure in the first-ever criminal trial of a former U.S. president.
Trump is accused of illegally falsifying business records to hide his former lawyer Michael Cohen's $130,000 hush money payment to Daniels just before voters went to the polls in the 2016 election. He has denied all charges.
Daniels was looking to tell her story of a one-night tryst with Trump at a celebrity golf tourney a decade before the 2016 election or get paid for staying quiet about a liaison that Trump claims never occurred.
Prosecutors are looking for Hicks to describe the behind-the-scenes campaign turmoil in the weeks ahead of the election while Trump mulled how to respond to the salacious claims he was facing.
On Thursday, prosecutors played a 2016 call Cohen secretly recorded of a conversation he had with Trump in which they both discussed the funding of a $150,000 hush money payment to Karen McDougal, Playboy magazine's 1998 Playmate of the Year. She has claimed she had a monthslong affair with Trump in 2006 and 2007 that Trump has denied.
Before Hicks started testifying, Trump defense lawyer Emil Bove cross-examined Douglas Daus, a forensic analyst for the prosecutor's office, as Bove tried to downplay the information on Cohen's cell phone, suggesting there might be "gaps in the handling of this data that created risks" for tampering with the phone.