Latest Witness In Trump Trial Is Controversial Attorney With Ties To Trump’s Billionaire

When Donald Trump posted his $175 million bond in New York earlier this month, the owner of the insurer that provided the bond, billionaire Don Hankey, said he’d never previously met or spoken with the former president. Hankey did acknowledge backing Trump politically, though. And public records show Hankey was the largest shareholder in Axos Financial, the parent company of the bank that bailed out Trump, twice, by helping him refinance his mortgages at Trump Tower and his Miami resort.

There’s at least one other way in which the two billionaires’ orbits overlap a bit: attorney Keith Davidson, who took the stand as a witness for the prosecution in Trump’s criminal trial in New York on Tuesday.

Davidson represented Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal when they separately approached Trump for hush-money payments in 2016—a fact Matthew Colangelo, a senior counsel to the Manhattan district attorney, mentioned early in his opening statement last week. According to Colangelo, Davidson told the National Enquirer’s Editor-in-Chief Dylan Howard that his client, McDougal, was “shopping around her account of her affair” with Trump during the stretch run of the presidential campaign, prompting Howard to fly to California to meet with Davidson and McDougal. The National Enquirer eventually paid the former Playboy Playmate $150,000 for the rights to her story, which Colangelo said was well above what the tabloid would typically pay for this type of information, as part of an alleged plot with Trump attorney Michael Cohen to keep her quiet during the election.

About a month before the election, adult film actress Stormy Daniels, also represented by Davidson, came forward with her allegations of having a sexual encounter with Trump. Daniels ended up negotiating a $130,000 payout from Trump, via Cohen, in exchange for signing a nondisclosure agreement.

In 2018, Daniels sued Davidson and Cohen, alleging that after she signed the NDA, Davidson breached his obligations as an attorney by colluding with Cohen to take actions that benefited Trump. Specifically, Daniels claimed that Davidson worked with Cohen to arrange for her to go on Fox News and refute an article regarding her relationship with Trump. She also accused Davidson of tipping off Cohen about her plans to change attorneys, publicly disclose her relationship with Trump and sue Cohen and Trump. (Davidson and Cohen settled that suit.)  McDougal made similar allegations against Davidson. In a 2018 lawsuit against the parent company of the National Enquirer, her new attorneys alleged that Davidson lied to her about a potential payout, failed to properly inform her of her rights under a contract and overall worked “closely with representatives for Mr. Trump while pretending to advocate on her behalf.”

Despite his former clients’ allegations that he had sold them out for Trump’s benefit during the campaign, Davidson didn’t seem thrilled with Trump’s upset win. On election night, Davidson sent an editor at the National Enquirer a text reading, “What have we done?,” according to Colangelo in his opening statement.

Davidson entered Hankey’s orbit, meanwhile, in April 2020, when the attorney filed a civil lawsuit in Los Angeles on behalf of three Jane Does against Hankey’s son, Don Rufus Hankey. Rufus is identified in the suit as “a former executive with the Hankey Group.” He was listed as the chairman of one of the firm’s subsidiaries as late as July 2018 but had been scrubbed from the site by August 2019, according to the Internet Archive.

Don Hankey said he has not been involved in the case and was not even aware of it when Forbes contacted him. “These events might have happened around 2017 to 2018, and I had forgotten about it,” he said. According to Hankey, Rufus left the family’s company more than 10 years ago, and they only see each other once every two years. One of Rufus’s attorneys, Stephen Larson of the boutique Los Angeles-based firm Larson LLP also said that Don Hankey had not participated in Rufus’s defense.

“Now I see why insurance companies and banks are afraid to do business with Trump,” Hankey said in response to Forbes’ inquiries about the case.

The suit accuses Rufus Hankey of “sexual assault, false imprisonment and forced trafficked sex acts” and spreading “dreaded sexually transmitted diseases,” including Human Papilloma Virus, herpes, gonorrhea and chlamydia. (When one of the women confronted Rufus Hankey after she tested positive, according to the complaint, he replied, “Fuck off you whore–that is what you get! Plus, you probably got it from your mom.”) The three plaintiffs sought unspecified compensatory, punitive and general damages. The younger Hankey has maintained his innocence throughout the proceedings and filed a cross-complaint, accusing the three plaintiffs of extortion, defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The Los Angeles court did not have any records of the allegations against Hankey leading to a criminal case. Los Angeles Police Department policy prohibits sharing information about any possible investigations unless an arrest is made, although a person with knowledge of the lawsuit said a police report had been filed. Rufus Hankey did not respond to requests for comment for this article. “I would think Rufus would have settled if the allegations were true,” Don Hankey said.

After two-and-a-half years of pretrial proceedings, two of the Jane Does agreed to a stipulated judgment with Hankey in December 2022, resolving all allegations. According to the court filing, no money changed hands. A person familiar with the case also said that Hankey did not make any settlement payments. Jane Doe No. 1, however, did not join the stipulated judgment and has continued to pursue her claims. She has been doing it without an attorney though: just days after two of his three clients agreed to the stipulated judgment, with the potential for a big payday diminished, Davidson filed a motion to quit the case. Jane Doe No. 1 refused to comment to Forbes. Davidson declined to speak on the record.

In August 2023, the judge denied Rufus Hankey’s motions for a summary judgment in the case. A trial is scheduled to begin in May, without Davidson involved.

Daniels, McDougal and the three Jane Does are the types of clients Davidson has made a career representing: His website boasts of securing big payouts for sexual assault, STD transmission and negligence. “Celeb Dirt To Be Sold? You Better Call Keith,” reads the headline of a 2018 profile by the Smoking Gun. While Trump has repeatedly attacked Cohen’s credibility, Davidson’s past also might provide an opening to question his trustworthiness as a witness. Adult film actress Capri Anderson hired Davidson in 2010 when she alleged that Charlie Sheen had assaulted her in New York’s Plaza Hotel. Sheen later filed a lawsuit against Anderson, claiming that she and Davidson “concocted alleged details…that were woven from whole cloth, with the specific design and intent of using the fabricated details to try to shake down Sheen for at least a million dollars.” Sheen later dismissed his case, which did not name Davidson as a defendant.

Sheen’s and Daniels’ suits are not the only instances when Davidson’s work has come into question. The California bar suspended Davidson’s law license for 90 days and required him to attend ethics school in 2010 after he failed to appear at pre-trial hearings and file motions, leading to his clients’ medical malpractice suit to get dismissed. And in 2017, Hulk Hogan sued Davidson, alleging that, on behalf of his clients, he tried to extort Hogan over a sex tape. That case, which involved several defendants, was settled.

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