Early in April, Michael Cohen found himself facing a snap decision. Nearly a year into his 36-month sentence at the Otisville federal correctional facility, about 70 miles northwest of his Trump Park Avenue apartment, he had gotten into an altercation with a fellow inmate, who had complained about Cohen’s phone use. As a result, Cohen was being transferred to the Special Housing Unit, known as the “shu” or solitary confinement. At any moment, prison guards would arrive to pack up his belongings. This process sometimes meant guards would discard contraband or things they thought were trash, and Cohen panicked. Hidden in his cell was a 500-odd page preliminary manuscript for the tell-all he had decided to call Disloyal. He knew the guards largely supported Donald Trump, Cohen’s former boss and a subject of the book. He also knew they sometimes leaked things about him or other high-profile inmates in his minimum-security camp. That manuscript would be a jackpot.
It happened to be the first night of Passover, the holiday for which Jewish people forgo leavened bread and replace it with matzah, and Otisville houses a fair number of Orthodox inmates who were preparing to observe. As such, they’d built a customary fire to torch the hametz—leavened products—on the premises. Cohen grabbed his manuscript, made his way to the fire, and dropped the pages in.
Luckily, his wife had a copy of the manuscript on a thumb drive. Cohen’s book is now set to be released in the coming weeks, after years of speculation about what he may have witnessed. The foreword of the book, which Cohen published on his website earlier this month, fans the flames. “I know where the skeletons are buried because I was the one who buried them,” it reads. “I was the one who most encouraged him to run for president in 2011, and then again in 2015, carefully orchestrating the famous trip down the escalator in Trump Tower for him to announce his candidacy. When Trump wanted to reach Russian President Vladimir Putin, via a secret back channel, I was tasked with making the connection in my Keystone Kop fashion. I stiffed contractors on his behalf, ripped off his business partners, lied to his wife, Melania, to hide his sexual infidelities, and bullied and screamed at anyone who threatened Trump’s path to power. From golden showers in a sex club in Vegas, to tax fraud, to deals with corrupt officials from the former Soviet Union, to catch and kill conspiracies to silence Trump’s clandestine lovers, I wasn’t just a witness to the president’s rise—I was an active and eager participant.”
Cohen told people that after he posted the foreword online, his website crashed. He upped its bandwidth, but a half hour later it supposedly crashed again. The book shot up the Amazon charts, even without a powerhouse publisher. Like his boss, Cohen has often been his own best marketer. It helped that the book has been a subject of fascination since before he wrote a single word. At least four members of Congress asked him if he planned to write a book when he testified on Capitol Hill in the winter of 2019. “Will you today commit to donate any further proceeds to book deals, to film reviews, to charity?” asked Rep. Michael Cloud. Cohen said he would not.
It helped, too, that a wave of publicity earlier this summer whetted the national appetite for what he had to say. As I reported at the time, Cohen was released from Otisville as part of the Bureau of Prisons’ compassionate-release program in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, but balked at the conditions for his home confinement, which stipulated that he forgo his right to publish a book or speak to the media for the remainder of his sentence. Cohen refused to sign and was returned to prison until a judge ruled in his favor, noting that in all his years on the bench he had never seen a clause like the one the BOP had asked Cohen to sign. Cohen was released and, after a cease and desist letter from Trump lawyer Charles Harder and initial hesitation from publishers, signed a deal with Skyhorse.