Part 4: Means of Control
The Mar-a-Lago tape, the Bobby phone call, Olivia's side of the story, and the neighbor who cracked the case.
Bobby and Olivia planned to consummate their relationship on August 23, 2024, in Phoenix, Arizona, after he endorsed Trump at a rally in nearby Glendale. The timing was perfect. Bobby would no longer be a presidential candidate himself, so the media glare would dim, and, more importantly, Olivia later told me, he would no longer have the Secret Service protection that complicated an encounter. (And presumably Cheryl wouldn’t be around, either.) Olivia had a present for Bobby she was going to bring: a 1943 edition of Brenda Starr, Girl Reporter, a book based on the old comic strip about Starr’s wild adventures while on assignment for a newspaper.
There were two problems. Inconveniently for them, I was also planning to be in Arizona to cover the Trump-Kennedy event. And then, a few days before the rally and the planned hotel room encounter, after Bobby and Olivia had been talking, texting, and FaceTiming for almost a year, I finally learned about their affair. Olivia reluctantly canceled her rendezvous with Bobby, who was about to become one of the most powerful figures in the Trump universe, a fortuitous development because Olivia was wrapping up her latest New York magazine assignment, a profile of Trump.
This is the point where our story starts to get weird, when a series of events unfolds from August through November that thrusts me into a Kafkaesque nightmare, driven by Bobby’s extreme paranoia about what I know and Olivia’s extreme fears about what Bobby might do to her if I tell anyone.
But first, you are probably wondering what Izzy told Olivia she believed she had overheard Trump say about his attempted assassination when Izzy was secretly recording Trump and his campaign aides at Mar-a-Lago on August 13, 2024.
According to Olivia, Izzy thought Trump said something that cast doubt on the official story behind Trump’s bloody ear, which was injured on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, when Thomas Crooks tried to kill Trump.
I assumed the context of what Izzy thought she overheard was about whether it was one of the eight rounds fired by Crooks that nicked Trump’s ear or something else—ricocheting glass or a bullet fragment—but that’s just speculation.
What I know from Olivia is that the quality of the audio recording was poor, that she couldn’t corroborate Izzy’s recollection, that she discussed the recording with Bobby, and that after a phone call with Bobby while he was on vacation with his wife in Baja, Olivia erased the recording.
Obviously, this episode raises a lot of questions:
When did Bobby learn about the operation to record Trump, and was it before or after it happened?
Did Bobby ever disclose what he knew to the Trump campaign or anyone else?
Did Olivia pass on any intel to Bobby from the recording, which would have included hours of Trump’s private campaign meetings at Mar-a-Lago, that aided him in his endorsement negotiations with Trump?
What information from the recording, if any, did Olivia use in her profile of Trump, which was published on September 9, 2024?
What did Trump really say about Butler, if anything?
Does anyone still have a copy of the recording?
The answers to these questions, and any additional information about what really happened, will have to come from Olivia, Izzy, and Bobby.
But the secret Mar-a-Lago operation, which was done in part to help Bobby, whether he knew about it ahead of time or not, raises another question many of you have asked me in recent days: How did Bobby come to have such control over Olivia? Here’s what I know about that, starting with what I learned during my phone call with Bobby on Saturday, August 24, when I asked him about his affair with Olivia.