Judge Merchan Holds Trump in Contempt for Violating Gag Order in Hush-Money Trial

He was the man behind the hush money, the amiable Beverly Hills lawyer who specialized in celebrity dirt — unearthing it, and then, for the right price, burying it forever.

But in 2016, the lawyer, Keith Davidson, was on the verge of something grander than a run-of-the-mill sex tape or affair. He had two clients shopping stories so big they might sway a presidential election: Their names were Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, and they were ready to tell the world about their sexual encounters with Donald J. Trump.

In the days ahead, the Manhattan district attorney’s office will question Mr. Davidson at Mr. Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan, asking him to take jurors behind the scenes to see how Mr. Trump’s allies bought his clients’ silence. Mr. Davidson, who began testifying earlier in the week, is expected to face questioning about the hush-money payment to Ms. Daniels, as well as its aftermath, when for a time she denied having an affair with Mr. Trump.

On Thursday, after the regular midweek break in the trial, prosecutors are expected to wrap up their questioning of Mr. Davidson, and then Mr. Trump’s lawyers will have the chance to cross-examine him.

Already, his hours of testimony opened a rare window on the seamy world of celebrity hush money and corroborated key facts underpinning the prosecution’s case against Mr. Trump, the first American president to face a criminal trial.

In a crucial back-and-forth with prosecutors this week, Mr. Davidson began to tie Mr. Trump to the $130,000 hush-money payment to Ms. Daniels, the porn star whose payoff is at the heart of the case. Although Mr. Trump did not pay Ms. Daniels directly — his fixer, Michael D. Cohen did — Mr. Davidson portrayed Mr. Trump as the hidden hand shaping the machinations.

“Michael Cohen didn’t have the authority to actually spend money,” Mr. Davidson told the jury, adding, “My understanding was that Mr. Trump was the beneficiary of this contract.”

The testimony punctuated a high-stakes day on Tuesday that began with the judge holding Mr. Trump in contempt, fining the former president $9,000 for repeatedly violating a gag order and warning that he could go to to jail if he continued to attack witnesses and jurors.

“The court will not tolerate continued willful violations of its lawful orders,” the judge, Juan M. Merchan, said in an ominous warning to open the third week of Mr. Trump’s trial. He added that although he was “keenly aware of, and protective of, defendant’s First Amendment rights,” he would jail Mr. Trump “if necessary and appropriate.”

The judge’s crackdown injected instant tension into the day’s proceedings before three new witnesses took the stand.

The most significant was Mr. Davidson, who began by recounting his representation of Ms. McDougal, a Playboy model who said she’d had an affair with Mr. Trump in 2006.

In a striking stretch of testimony, Mr. Davidson read aloud for the jury a series of off-color text exchanges from 2016, telling a National Enquirer editor that he had a “blockbuster Trump story” about Mr. Trump cheating on his wife, Melania Trump, with Ms. McDougal. When some of Ms. McDougal’s female friends urged her to go to ABC News instead, Mr. Davidson warned that the story might slip away if The National Enquirer didn’t pay, and fast.

“Time is of the essence,” Mr. Davidson wrote. “The girl is being cornered by the estrogen mafia,” a message that Mr. Davidson, mortified by his years-old remarks, called “a very unfortunate, regrettable text” during his testimony.

That testimony offered another remarkable moment in a trial whose early days have been full of them: a former president, the current Republican nominee, watching helplessly as two strangers exposed details of a sex scandal that he had fought to keep secret.

It also underscored the array of evidence at the prosecution’s disposal as it assembled its case. On Tuesday alone, prosecutors introduced live testimony from Mr. Davidson and three other witnesses, a string of provocative text messages, videos of Trump campaign events and excerpts from a deposition the former president gave in a separate case — all woven into a story that they say paints Mr. Trump as a criminal.

As Mr. Davidson got deeper into details, his testimony also bolstered a key component of the prosecution’s contention that The Enquirer was involved in a secret plot to boost Mr. Trump’s candidacy.

The publication bought Ms. McDougal’s silence for $150,000, but balked at laying out a huge sum for Ms. Daniels. So the tabloid instead notified Mr. Cohen that Ms. Daniels was shopping her story, setting in motion the $130,000 hush-money deal.

Mr. Davidson provided jurors with a detailed account of negotiations in Ms. Daniels’s case. Although her story of a tryst with Mr. Trump had been floating around for years, he noted that interest in it spiked after the emergence of the “Access Hollywood” tape, on which Mr. Trump bragged about groping women.

The tape sent Mr. Trump’s campaign into a tailspin, but if Ms. Daniels’s story got out, Mr. Davidson said, it could have gotten a lot worse.

When Mr. Cohen was slow to pay, Mr. Davidson recalled phoning him to say “this is a very bad situation,” warning that Ms. Daniels and her agent were preparing to go public. Mr. Cohen became agitated, noting that “my guy” — Mr. Trump — was campaigning in several states that day, and “I’m doing everything I can.”

Eventually, Mr. Cohen made the payment himself, and Mr. Trump reimbursed him. Prosecutors have charged the former president, who faces up to four years in prison, with falsifying business records to cover up that repayment.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen had a falling-out years ago, and their mutual hatred has become a major motif of the trial.

Mr. Trump is apparently not the only one in the courtroom to have strong feelings about Mr. Cohen, who will be a star prosecution witness in the weeks ahead. Three different witnesses offered unflattering descriptions of the former fixer; Mr. Davidson called him a “jerk” and recalled that when he talked to Mr. Cohen, he was met with a barrage of “insults,” “insinuations” and “allegations.”

While it might seem strange for prosecutors to elicit such unflattering characterizations of a key witness, they may end up working in the prosecution’s favor, desensitizing jurors to Mr. Cohen’s rough edges and making him a memorable and entertaining character in their eyes. It might be working: A few jurors flashed smiles as Mr. Davidson used an expletive to describe him.

The Trump-Cohen feud also surfaced Tuesday in Justice Merchan’s decision to hold Mr. Trump in contempt, determining that the former president had flouted the gag order by making nine statements on social media and on his campaign website in which he attacked the jury and certain witnesses, including Mr. Cohen. The judge ordered Mr. Trump to remove the posts by Tuesday afternoon, and he did.

Mr. Trump, who was accompanied in court by a larger-than-usual entourage, including his son Eric Trump; a campaign adviser, Susie Wiles; and Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, did not immediately react to the judge’s ruling. During a break soon after, he stood and glowered at the room.

The ruling marked a nadir in relations between the court and Mr. Trump. The former president has attended every day of the trial, though he has largely been relegated to the sidelines, complaining to cameras afterward about the gag order and the judge. Now, with the financial penalty — and the specter of jail time — his fury could reach a boiling point.

Already, prosecutors have alerted the judge to four new potential violations. Those were not covered by Justice Merchan’s Tuesday order and will be discussed at another hearing on Thursday morning.

The judge’s decision and his questioning at the hearing last week took aim at two of Mr. Trump’s typical tactics: his tendency to lie and his habit of suggesting that every action he takes is political, even when it concerns his criminal cases.

Justice Merchan for the most part rejected Mr. Trump’s argument that his posts did not violate the gag order because they were responses to political attacks by adversaries who, by coincidence, happen to be potential witnesses.

Mr. Cohen has slammed Mr. Trump on social media, though last week he vowed to “cease posting anything about Donald,” a decision he said he had made “out of respect for Judge Merchan and the prosecutors.”

If Mr. Cohen breaks his silence, he may not be protected from Mr. Trump’s attacks: The judge, in his Tuesday order, suggested that if witnesses provoked Mr. Trump, the former president might be free to respond.

The gag order, Justice Merchan wrote, cannot “be used as a sword instead of a shield by potential witnesses.”

Aside from Mr. Cohen, the other potential witness whom Mr. Trump attacked is Ms. Daniels.

The former president denies that he and Ms. Daniels had sex, and in one post for which he was fined, he attacked Ms. Daniels on his website Truth Social, reviving a years-old statement in which she denied the affair. Mr. Trump added a comment falsely portraying the statement as newly discovered: “LOOK WHAT WAS JUST FOUND! WILL THE FAKE NEWS REPORT IT?”

Mr. Trump failed to note that the original statement was from January 2018 and that Ms. Daniels had recanted it not long afterward.

During last week’s hearing, Justice Merchan focused on Mr. Trump’s lie about when the statement came to light.

“So that’s not true?” he asked Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Todd Blanche.

“That’s not true,” Mr. Blanche conceded.

In Tuesday’s ruling, Justice Merchan concluded that Mr. Trump could be held accountable for reposting other people’s comments. In one instance, Mr. Trump had quoted a Fox News commentator, Jesse Watters, denigrating potential jurors in the case as “undercover liberal activists.”

A day after the post, one of the jurors begged off the panel.

Justice Merchan imposed the order on Mr. Trump in late March, barring public statements about any witnesses, prosecutors, jurors or court staff, as well as their families. He expanded it to cover his own relatives and relatives of the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg after Mr. Trump found a loophole and repeatedly attacked the judge’s daughter, whose company has done consulting work for Democratic candidates.

Mr. Trump often assails people he used to praise and commends those he once pilloried.

Just before Mr. Davidson took the stand on Tuesday, for example, prosecutors showed a video in which Mr. Trump had praised Mr. Cohen, who had been by his side for years. He called him “a very talented lawyer.”

Reporting was contributed by Maggie Haberman, Kate Christobek, Wesley Parnell, Michael Gold and Jonathan Swan.