Far-Right News Site Forced To Retract Baseless Michael Cohen, Stormy Daniels Affair Story

The far-right news outlet One America News Network was forced on Monday to retract a baseless story about Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s onetime personal attorney, that claimed he had an affair with porn actor Stormy Daniels and “cooked up” a scheme to extort the former president.

OAN’s March 27 article was based on a single, unverified social media post that said the affair allegation had initially come from Michael Avenatti, an attorney who once represented Daniels.

Avenatti denied making the claim, saying in a statement from prison that “you folks should be smarter than to believe this nonsense.”

The piece had been titled “Whistleblower: Avenatti Alleged Cohen Daniels Affair Since 2006, Pre-2016 Trump Extortion Plan.”

Both Cohen and Daniels are key figures in Trump’s ongoing hush money trial in a Manhattan courtroom. The case hinges on the claim that Trump falsified business records in order to cover up payments made to keep allegations of the extramarital affair from coming out just before the 2016 election. (Trump denies the affair and has pleaded not guilty.)

Self-proclaimed investor and “CIA/NSA contractor/whistleblower” Tony Seruga, the author of the post OAN cited, wrote that Avenatti once told him Daniels and Cohen had a romantic relationship. Seruga wrote that “the whole hush money scheme” had been “cooked up” by Cohen in order to “extort” the Trump Organization.

OAN writer Brooke Mallory embedded the post in her article and wrote that, “if confirmed,” the man’s claim “would shatter the story surrounding Stormy Daniels and Donald Trump that Biden and the liberal mainstream media have been hanging onto for years.”

It is not clear what steps, if any, Mallory took to verify the claim.

Avenatti denied making