The judge overseeing Donald J. Trump’s criminal case in Manhattan held him in contempt on Tuesday, 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 — 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 in the first criminal trial of an American president.
The most significant was Keith Davidson, a lawyer who represented the porn star Stormy Daniels when she received the $130,000 hush-money payment at the center of the case. Mr. Davidson negotiated the payout with Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, in the waning days of the 2016 presidential campaign in order to silence Ms. Daniels’s account of a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump.
Mr. Davidson began his testimony by recounting his representation of another woman, Karen McDougal, a Playboy model who said she’d had an affair with Mr. Trump in 2006. He negotiated a payout from The National Enquirer that kept Ms. McDougal’s story from going public.
In a striking stretch of testimony, Mr. Davidson read aloud for the jury a series of off-color text exchanges from 2016, telling an Enquirer editor that he had a “blockbuster Trump story” about Mr. Trump cheating on his wife with Ms. McDougal. When some of Ms. McDougal’s women friends urged her to go to ABC News instead, Mr. Davidson warned that the story might slip away if The Enquirer didn’t pay, and fast.
