The National Enquirer paid a Trump Tower doorman for a love-child rumor in 2015 but dropped the story

The National Enquirer dropped another Trump-related story during the 2016 election season, this one involving an alleged love child.

Reports surfaced Wednesday that the tabloid’s parent company AMI paid a former Trump World Tower doorman $30,000 for information about a rumor that Donald Trump had a child with an employee in the 1980s, and then did not run a story. AMI employees told AP the company, owned by longtime Trump friend David Pecker, had a “catch and kill” policy in which it bought off sources who could potentially hurt Trump’s chances at winning the presidency.

Dino Sajudin worked as a doorman at Trump World Tower in New York when he began hearing rumors about Trump’s sex life, the Associated Press reported Wednesday evening. He allegedly approached the National Enquirer in late 2015, after Trump announced his candidacy for president. The Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc., paid Sajudin $30,000 in exchange for his information “in perpetuity.” If Sajudin discloses any information about the rumor, he’ll owe the company $1 million.

Another AMI publication, Radar Online, acknowledged the 2015 payment on Wednesday, which resulted in the AP and The New Yorker releasing more information on the deal.

Radar Online wrote that Sajudin passed a lie-detector test with the Enquirer, but that the tabloid couldn’t verify the claims and decided to drop the story.

“After passing the test, Sajudin demanded he be paid his entire source fee — $30,000 — up-front, or he was going to take the story elsewhere,” Radar Online wrote. “Faced with losing the source, or possibly losing its money, The ENQUIRER blinked, and agreed to pay the entire fee. But after four weeks of investigation, and dozens of phone calls, the tabloid — famed for proving John Edwards had fathered a ‘love child’ — concluded the story was NOT true.”

But current and former AMI employees told the AP that the deal was part of a “catch and kill” policy of paying off sources who could hurt Trump’s chances at winning the presidency. They said they were told to immediately stop reporting on the story after the payoff.

“AMI doesn’t go around cutting checks for $30,000 and then not using the information,” Jerry George, a reporter and senior editor with AMI until 2013, told AP.

Another source told the AP that the Enquirer doesn’t just “pay thousands of dollars for non-stories, let alone tens of thousands. It was a highly curious and questionable situation.”

The AP and The New Yorker both reached out to the mother and father of the alleged Donald Trump child, who denied all of the rumors.

This isn’t the first time the media company has been accused of employing the “catch and kill” tactic to aid the Trump campaign. They also paid a former Playboy Playmate $150,000 in 2016 to keep quiet about a claim that she had an affair with Trump in 2006. The Enquirer never published a story on the affair, and said it paid the former Playmate to be a columnist for an AMI-published fitness magazine, not to stay silent. She is currently suing to get out of her non-disclosure agreement, and has claimed that Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, was involved in the negotiations. Cohen was also involved with Sajudin’s payment, according to the AP, just in that he worked with the Enquirer as a Trump spokesperson while they were reporting the story.

Cover image: President-elect Donald Trump arrives at Carrier Corp in Indianapolis Dec. 6, 2016. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings)