Was CNN Anchor First To Reveal President’s “Love Child” In Her Novel?

Have you heard the one about the President, the housekeeper and the love child? Well, if you haven’t caught up with the news yet, that’s the story for which the National Enquirer tabloid paid a Trump Tower doorman $30, 000 — only to kill the story dead, reportedly because David Pecker, Enquirer publisher and Trump buddy, wanted to protect Trump just before the 2016 presidential election.

The news of this purported “hush-money” payment for a story about an affair Donald Trump had with a Trump Organization housekeeper, and which allegedly produced a child back in the 80s broke this week. (Full details can be found in this Associated Press report, and in a really good summary of who’s saying what in heavy.com an online news and entertainment magazine.)

Same Story

BUT WAIT! Dear readers, wait till I explain what really got me excited about this one. No, not the fact that the words “Trump” and “love” were being used in the same sentence. No. As cable TV news, late-night TV, and online news reports zeroed in on the buzzwords, president, housekeeper, affair, love child, I felt my mouth dropping open for a different reason: I’d just read exactly this very same story only days before.

Where?  In a novel, originally published last summer by Alisyn Camerota, a former anchor with Fox News, and currently a CNN news anchor.  I’d downloaded the book, Amanda Wakes Up to take on a plane ride, and subsequently wrote a brief review for last week’s blog.

This is what I wrote about one of the book’s main characters, a presidential candidate named Victor Fluke who appears regularly on a fictional morning show hosted by fictional news anchor Amanda Gallo: “Fluke who spouts abhorrent views that Amanda’s fictional TV network is only too willing to air unchallenged does remind the reader of one very real-life political disaster!”

Thin Disguise

Of course, I meant Trump. I have not been the only one to draw the comparison between Fluke and Trump — a regular political pundit on Camerota’s morning show, Fox and Friends before he announced he was running for president.

In the book, Fluke’s base are the “Ameri-cans.” He “goes after immigrants. He calls children of immigrants ‘anchor babies.’ He says he wants to outlaw abortion.” Amanda is told not to challenge him on his views because he’s a big ratings draw on the show.

As I remarked in my short review on last week’s blog, and in my Goodreads review, I picked up the book because I felt it would be a delightful, breezy read — which it was. I cared less about the narrative arc of the second, more serious part of the novel which is meant to test Amanda’s ambitions and which involves a tip she gets that Fluke is not what he seems in public.

However, after this week’s real-life revelations about the story the Enquirer never ran, I returned to the part of the novel where Amanda Gallo’s fictional TV news network turns down the opportunity to run the story that Fluke is a hypocrite and adulterer.

Amanda Finds A Love Child

Amanda has information that Fluke had an affair with Martina, an undocumented Haitian housekeeper and then bought her a house to keep her quiet — but Amanda’s network boss isn’t interested. She pursues the story on her own time, and tracks down the housekeeper to Texas where she manages to get inside the house to talk to Martina.

Then, comes this paragraph after Martina’s 15-year old daughter bursts into the room: Amanda writing in the first person says: “I stared at the girl who looked eerily familiar[…] And then the hair on the back of my neck prickled. I knew where I’d seen her — in Victor Fluke’s face. She looked like a young, female Fluke. I tried to keep my eyes from popping out of my head and my mouth from saying, “Holy Shit!”

The girl is Fluke’s daughter, but Martina refuses to go public. She doesn’t want her daughter to know the truth.  “She can’t find out that Victor Fluke is her father,” she tells Amanda. “She hates that man. She yells at the TV when he comes on. She calls him Victor Fake.”

Housekeepers & Love Children

In Camerota’s novel, then, a Haitian housekeeper has an affair with a man many years before he runs for president, and as a result has an illegitimate daughter with whom she  moves to Austin, Texas.

In real-life, in the story for which the Enquirer paid $30K a housekeeper who worked for Trump has an affair with him in the 80s — many years before he runs for president — and as a result reportedly has an illegitimate daughter who now lives in California.

Coincidence?

Maybe. But at least one inquiring mind wants to know: Did Camerota hear about the story of Trump’s purported affair and love child before she finished writing her book? In late 2015, when the tipster doorman approached the Enquirer with the story, Camerota was working at CNN and almost certainly still writing her novel which wasn’t published till almost two years later in July 2017. It is possible that the Trump Towers doorman was doing the rounds of media organizations with his tip. It happens. And then a story becomes an open secret among reporters from different organizations who were approached with the tip — but turned it down. That doesn’t seem to have happened in this case.

It’s more likely Camerota got wind of the spiked Enquirer story from a disgruntled reporter or editor on that publication. New York journalists move in fairy tight circles, and are known to be notorious gossips. For example, according to the Associated Press report this week, at least four Enquirer staffers objected to being “ordered by top editors to stop pursuing the story before completing potentially promising threads.”

I imagine there would have been a lot of griping among them and their friends at the time. After all, in 2008, Enquirer reporters pursuing a similar paternity story about presidential candidate, Sen. John Edwards derailed his career as a result of finding Edwards’ mistress and love child. That expose was nominated for a Pulitzer prize.

Camerota Explains

And, then there’s Camerota’s explanation for her prescience. Almost as if she knew that the Trump story would surface one day, she writes in an Author’s Note at the end of her novel: “If as you read this novel you start to wonder whether I’m psychic, the answer is I knew you were going to ask that. I can’t count how many times my editors, agent and I would gasp in amazement at how something I’d already written came true in the 2016 election [… ] But, it turns out truth is stranger than fiction.”

Or sometimes truth is just the truth — but it has to pretend it’s fiction until the moment is right.