spike lee do the right thing essay

“Do the Right Thing” by Spike Lee: Film Analysis Essay

Introduction.

The movie “Do the Right Thing” by Spike Lee can be acclaimed as one of the most successful dramas released in 1989. This is no wonder as the film features outstanding play by actors, an interesting and thought-provoking layout, and good quality of its accomplishment. Overall, the film appears to be a great piece of film-making art representing the themes of racism, nationalism, discrimination, and all the complexity behind the necessity to live and cope with each other by the representatives of the most different nationalities and races.

An overview of the film

First of all, speaking about the film “Do the Right Thing” by Spike Lee, its general theme is to be addressed. The film is dedicated to the issues of racism, nationalism, and discrimination along with the complexity of relations between nations. The modern reality of American society where the representatives of the most different races and nationalities have to deal with each other daily is shown in the movie. This reality is cruel and full of pain and unhappiness. It is also full of conflicts and extreme violence. Bartley describer this terrible violence in the following way:

Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in the destruction of all. The law of an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind. It is immoral because it seeks to annihilate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys the community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends by defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers (2006, p. 10).

Along with racial intolerance and violence caused by it, one of the central themes in the movie is uncontrolled police brutality. The scenes depicting this topic appeared to be mind-blowing when they were first shown in 1989. However, even nowadays, they become a reason for heated debates in the press and a source of fiery critics by the mainstream media.

Next, the film’s plot develops around the racial conflict which constantly grows into cruel violence and hatred between the representatives of different nations and races shown in it. From day to day, the situation is getting ever more heated as the main protagonist belonging to African-Americans and working for an Italian family comes to initiate a conflict with its members on the reason of a measure of misunderstanding along with racial intolerance. Then, the conflict is getting more complicated as a result of interference into it of more and more people including police acting cruelly and brutally which considerably worsened it. Eventually, it becomes outrageously serious and causes a lot of cruelty and violence.

Further, speaking about the character development in the movie, it should be stated that it is accomplished brilliantly in the movie. This might be illustrated by several characters. For instance, the main protagonist’s character appears to be remarkable even at the beginning of the movie. However, with the development of the story plot, it becomes more memorable and more distinguished. Mookie, the main protagonist, faces a moral dilemma as his conflict with his employers develops. This cruel conflict wounds his soul and heart multiple times, but this does not rob him of his moral values. As a result, he faces the moral dilemma of whether he is to do the right things under complicated circumstances or not. As this moral dilemma develops, the strength of this character is shown. Remarkable is the fact that after more than twenty years after the release of this movie Mookie’s character continues to be one of the brightest characters ever created by American filmmakers (Bartley 2006).

In addition, the film features excellent style which makes Spike Lee one of the best African-American directors in the world. After its first release in 1989, “Do the Right Thing” sparked a furor on the reason for its innovative style. One of the main reasons is the combination of excellent actor play, great script, and ingenious work by the cinematographers and editors.

The evaluation of the film’s performance and acting

Finally, addressing the film’s performance, it should be stated again that it is remarkable. The actorship by John Turturro, Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, Giancarlo Esposito, and Spike Lee himself is to be especially emphasized. All of these talented actors highly impressed the audience along with film critics by their skillful play touching minds and hearts to the extremity. Regarding the editing techniques used in the production, it should be also noted that they were incredible. Similar statements can be made concerning the staging techniques and lighting used in the production of the movie. According to Scott (2006, par.7),

The editing techniques used in the production

As a film, Do the Right Thing is a study of how cinematography can effectively add credence to plot and character development. The film’s sensual details, such as the hot, sticky, suffocating heat of a summer day, are visually stunning. Since weather plays a significant role in the film from start to finish – -it is the oppressive summer heat that stokes racial conflicts to the surface, driving the film to its tragic and violent climax – the cinematographer’s use of light and color increases its visual power.

The staging techniques and lighting used in the production

The set design, costumes, and makeup.

Several new techniques were applied by the filmmakers in the above-mentioned areas. For example, the light specialists put a lot of work into adding red and orange colors to the film’s picture which had a greater impact on the audience as it represented the depth of racial intolerance and conflict in a special way. Such technique became an exclusive feature of this film. Similar effects were made by the set design, costumes, and makeup which were accomplished in such a way that helped the audience pay more attention to the main themes addressed in the movie.

Concluding on all the above-discussed information, it should be stated that this brilliant drama by Spike Lee can be marked as a strong address to several critical issues which are especially timely during the last few decades. This film impels thinking about such questions as what is to be done to preserve healthy relationships between the representatives of different national groups and races, how police brutality can be controlled, and how to cope with such a significant problem of nowadays as discrimination on the reason of ethnical intolerance. “Do the Right Thing” impresses greatly and can be evaluated as very engaging; it is mainly explained by the team of professionals busy in it; especially, the director’s cut and incredible play by its cast including inimitable Ossie Davis and Danny Aiello.

Bartley, W. (2006). Mookie as “wavering Hero”: Do the Right Thing and the American Historical Romance. Literature/Film Quarterly, 34 (1), 9+.

Scott, C. (2006). Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing: An Explosive Film That Continues to Spark Questions About Racism in America. Web.

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Bibliography

IvyPanda . ""Do the Right Thing" by Spike Lee: Film Analysis." October 30, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/do-the-right-thing-film-by-spike-lee-essay/.

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Film Analysis: Do the Right Thing | Dir. Spike Lee

Do The Right Thing (1989)

Criterion #97

DIRECTOR:   Spike Lee

Writer: spike lee, editor: barry alexander brown, top billing cast, danny aiello, ossie davis.

On a sweltering hot day, the people of Bedford-Stuyvesant and Sal’s Pizzeria live out their daily lives while existing tensions simmer between them and threaten to explode.

In one of the most iconic sequences from Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing , Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) explains “the story of love and hate.” As the camera pans, Raheem looks directly at the camera and proudly holds out his fists to us, revealing jewelry emblazoned “Love” on one fist, and “Hate” on the other. Raheem interlocks his fingers and declares that all of life is a constant struggle between these two emotions.

As effectively blunt as this scene is, the concepts that resonate most throughout the film are the more ambiguous ones that subtly question the straightforward “answers” given within this scene. The end of the film leaves the viewer to wonder the perhaps irreconcilable questions that the film proposes. How should one “do the right thing”? What are their options? Ultimately, the film evokes themes about the impulsivity of decision-making and the impossible choices of morality.

Rather than a traditional plot, we meet a cast of characters who are equally ambiguous and variant in nature and watch as they interact with one another over the course of a single day. The film opens with narration from Mister Señor Love Daddy ( Samuel L. Jackson ), a radio DJ who seems to, while on-air, account for every single person in his neighborhood and inadvertently control their disputes. There’s Smiley ( Roger Guenveur Smith ), a disabled man struggling to earn money by selling copies of a photograph of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X posing together. We meet Radio Raheem, who walks around repeatedly playing Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” on his massive boom box on full blast, ignoring the resentment and anger of his neighbors. The film’s main character, Mookie ( Spike Lee ) has a job delivering pizzas from Sal’s Famous Pizzeria and seems to know every person he passes by on the streets. As he walks by, he often taunts them, “Get a job!” as they sit on their front steps trying to beat the heat.

Sal ( Danny Aiello ) and his two sons hurl racial insults and make horrible implications to Mookie, but Sal also considers Mookie to be “like family” and takes pride in his twenty-five years of feeding the predominantly-black neighborhood. Mookie is kind to everyone he passes on the street, but he also is a distant father who rarely visits his family. These conflicting attitudes and ambiguities reveal characters who are complex and often difficult for the viewer to identify with, yet, regardless of their pitfalls, we are also able to empathize with them because of Lee’s detailed, careful characterization.

As the film continues, tensions heighten, and the scorching weather makes things even worse. Buggin’ Out ( Giancarlo Esposito ) decides to boycott Sal’s Pizzeria because of the absence of black representation on the restaurant’s Wall of Fame, which only features Italian Americans. Buggin’ Out confronts Sal by declaring that he’s never seen any Italian Americans eating at this restaurant. Sal responds by telling him to put up those images when he has his own restaurant.

After a long and hot day, Buggin’ Out and Radio Raheem storm into Sal’s Pizzeria with Raheem’s radio blasting, you guessed it, “Fight the Power,” and demand that the pictures be added onto the wall. After shouting over Raheem’s music and exchanging racial slurs, Sal takes a baseball bat and destroys Raheem’s radio, silencing a musical representation of blackness that is not allowed in Sal’s restaurant.

A heated brawl ensues between Raheem and Sal, escalating the situation until the entire neighborhood erupts into violence and chaos . In the film’s most powerful moment, Mookie is forced to choose between his loyalty to Sal and his communal recognition of black oppression. As he makes his choice, we as viewers are conflicted. Do we take the side of Mookie, who has suffered repeated offenses from the white members in his neighborhood, and is defending his friend? Or do we take the side of Sal, who just wants some peace and quiet, but has had his livelihood destroyed because of his own actions?

One of the most compelling aspects of the film is that — despite the title — it never forces viewers to make a single decision between the characters’ delineations of right and wrong. Despite Raheem’s illustration of the battle between good and evil, we understand in moments filled with violence, quick decision-making, and heightened emotions that doing the right thing isn’t necessarily so simple, because “doing the right thing” is never clearly defined.

As the film presents the viewers with a final ambiguity in the end title sequence, we're compelled to view both perspectives and mourn for everyone involved. Even if none of the characters did the right thing, we could still understand their reasons and motivations. Beyond being a funny, intelligent film, Do The Right Thing is also complex in its ambiguous messages to its viewers and characters, creating a thought-provoking story without any unnecessary moral judgment or didacticism.

THE EXTRA MILE

For The Criterion Collection edition, there's an extensive behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of Do The Right Thing and an audio commentary track by director Spike Lee, cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, and production designer Wynn Thomas, and actor Joie Lee making this Criterion edition worth adding to your collection. Aside from these features, there is also a music video for “Fight the Power,” which is directed by Spike Lee. Most fascinating, though, is the 1989 Cannes Film Festival press conference with Spike Lee, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Richard Edson, and Joie Lee, where the cast answer questions and confront the varying reactions from audience members.

THE WHOLE PACKAGE

Buy  Do the Right Thing by The Criterion Collection

The packaging for the Criterion release of Do The Right Thing is pretty great, with the classic title font along the spine and the front cover. It’s a standard keep case DVD with two disks, one for the film and the other for the special features. The insert color booklet is enough to warrant adding this to your collection, along with the great special features.

three reasons

LOVE AND HATE

RESPONSE TO GENTRIFICATION

SMILEY’S ADDITION TO SAL’S WALL OF FAME

Related:   Read more  Criterion Audits   or check out  spoiler-free movie reviews of Criterion Collection titles .  

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Forming a Critical Sense of Race with Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing”

Interpretations of the film may differ by race, media scholar Kelli Marshall finds.

Each term, my film students watch Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989). And each term, they react similarly to the scene in which Mookie (Spike Lee) throws a trash can, igniting a neighborhood riot by breaking the window of the pizzeria where he works. Most students of color feel Lee’s character “did the right thing” while the majority of white students cannot understand why Mookie “would do such a thing to his boss.” Why this reaction—term after term, year after year?

Like most of Spike’s Lee’s films, Do the Right Thing challenges viewers. For starters, Lee consistently rams together the conflicting ideologies of Malcolm X (violence as self-defense and when necessary) and Martin Luther King, Jr. (always non-violence) without explicitly informing the spectator which is the better choice. What’s more, the large cast—compiled mostly of secondary characters—theoretically uneases filmgoers since Hollywood normally offers only two or three leads for us to follow.

But undoubtedly, it’s Lee’s characterization of Italian-American pizzeria owner, Sal (Danny Aiello), and Mookie’s decision to hurl that trash bin into Sal’s restaurant window that challenge many viewers. Is Mookie doing the right thing here? Is he not?

A first thought is this: students of color readily identify with Mookie because he is the film’s lead black character while white students relate to Sal because he is the film’s central white character. This conclusion, of course, is too simplistic. After all, a spectator of any race, ethnicity, class, age, or sexual orientation can connect with a character of any race, ethnicity, class, age, or sexual orientation.

But as Dan Flory points out in “Spike Lee and the Sympathetic Racist,” perhaps there is a tad of truth to this rather naïve assessment about identification and audience reception.

Spike Lee has said he wrote Danny Aiello’s Sal as a racist. Aiello, however, interpreted his character otherwise. “He’s a nice guy,” Aiello claims, “and he sees people as equal.” Aiello further points out that in the film’s climatic scene—when he destroys the boom box of Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn)—Sal has to look deep inside himself “to find the most insulting words he could to throw at those who made him angry.” As a result, Aiello argues, his character “ends up acting like a racist, even though he is not one.” It appears many of my white students make similar conclusions.

But as Dan Flory points out, several anti-black cues pepper Sal’s actions and speech, each of which should make viewers think twice about Aiello’s interpretation. For instance, Sal refers to his black customers as these people , language that distances himself from them and, in essence, “others” them. Similarly, in two scenes, Sal wields a baseball bat—a symbol of white-on-black violence in the 1980s. Moreover, Sal insults his black patrons with terms like jungle music , Africa , and niggers .

Finally, Aiello’s character reacts indifferently to Radio Raheem’s murder by uttering to the growing multiracial crowd around him, “You do what you’ve gotta do.” With such vitriolic words and actions on display one wonders why many of my students, mostly white, don’t (initially) see Sal as a racist.

Flory has a valid answer to this question: because of their life and viewing experience, non-white viewers form “a critical sense of race or double consciousness merely to function and survive in cultures like America’s.” In other words, my students of color possess a more “finely tuned racial awareness” than (most of) their white classmates.

Conversely, white viewers have difficulty “imagining their whiteness from the outside.” They are rarely asked to look at their whiteness critically and , furthermore, their life and viewing experiences have not required them to develop such forms of cognition. Consequently, when called upon to question and/or recognize such issues—as is the case with Do the Right Thing— my white students often find it challenging, even though they may not know why.

For white viewers to see Sal as a racist, they would be required to make “a disruptive change in their system of belief”—an ideology that already (although unconsciously) privileges “aspects of white advantage and power.” So rather than seeing Sal as racist and problematic, many white audiences view him as empathetic and morally good. Nonwhite audiences, on the other hand, see a character that represents—as is doubtless Spike Lee’s goal—a more realistic, more complex perspective on race.

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While I agree with Flory’s conclusions here, I want to clarify one thing: neither Flory nor I believes white viewers are somehow incapable of analyzing a complex text like Do the Right Thing . Certainly not! At the same time though, for nearly ten years the majority of my white students have read the character of Sal and Mookie’s decision to throw the trash can somewhat simply, which suggests there’s still work to be done.

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Not everybody thought the film was so even-handed. I sat behind a woman at the press conference who was convinced the film would cause race riots. Some critics agreed. On the Criterion DVD of the film, Lee reads from his reviews, noting that Joe Klein, in New York magazine, laments the burning of Sal's Pizzeria but fails to even note that it follows the death of a young black man at the hands of the police.

Many audiences are shocked that the destruction of Sal's begins with a trash can thrown through the window by Mookie (Lee), the employee Sal refers to as “like a son to me.” Mookie is a character we're meant to like. Lee says he has been asked many times over the years if Mookie did the right thing. Then he observes: “Not one person of color has ever asked me that question.” But the movie in any event is not just about how the cops kill a black man and a mob burns down a pizzeria. That would be too simple, and this is not a simplistic film. It covers a day in the life of a Brooklyn street, so that we get to know the neighbors, and see by what small steps the tragedy is approached.

The victim, Radio Raheem ( Bill Nunn ), is not blameless; he plays his boom box at deafening volume and the noise not only drives Sal ( Danny Aiello ) crazy, but also the three old black guys who sit and talk at the corner. He wears steel knuckles that spell out “ Love ” and “Hate,” and although we know Radio is harmless, and we've seen that “Love” wins when he stages an imaginary bout for Mookie, to the cops the knuckles look bad. Not that the cops look closely, because they are white, and when they pull Radio off of Sal in the middle of a fight, it doesn't occur to them that Radio might have been provoked (Sal has just pounded his boom box to pieces with a baseball bat).

There are really no heroes or villains in the film. There is even a responsible cop, who screams “that's enough!” as another cop chokes Radio with his nightstick. And perhaps the other cop is terrified because he is surrounded by a mob and the pizzeria is on fire. On and on, around and around, black and white, fear and suspicion breed and grow. Because we know all of the people and have spent all day on the street, we feel as much grief as anger. Radio Raheem is dead. And Sal, who has watched the neighborhood's kids grow up for 25 years and fed them with his pizza, stands in the ruins of his store.

A pizzeria does not equal a human life, but its loss is great to Sal, because it represents a rejection of the meaning of his own life, and Spike Lee knows that feels bad for Sal, and gives him a touching final scene with Mookie in which the unspoken subtext might be: Why can't we eat pizza, and raise our families, and run our businesses, and work at our jobs, and not let racism colonize our minds with suspicion?

The riot starts because Buggin' Out ( Giancarlo Esposito ) is offended that Sal has only photos of Italians in the wall of his pizzeria: Sinatra, DiMaggio, Pacino. He wonders why there isn't a black face up there. Sal tells him to open his own store and put up anyone he wants. One answer to Sal is that he's kept in business by the black people who buy his pizza. An answer to that is that we see no black-owned businesses on the street, and if it were not for Sal and the Koreans who run the corner grocery, the residents would have no place to buy food. And the answer to that is that economic discrimination against blacks has been institutionalized for years in America. And around and around.

The thing is, there are no answers. There may be heroes and villains, but on this ordinary street in Brooklyn they don't conveniently turn up wearing labels. You can anticipate, step by step, during a long, hot summer day, that trash can approaching Sal's window, propelled by misunderstandings, suspicions, insecurities, stereotyping and simple bad luck. Racism is so deeply ingrained in our society that the disease itself creates mischief, while most blacks and whites alike are only onlookers.

Seeing the film again today, I was reminded of what a stylistic achievement it is. Spike Lee was 32 when he made it, assured, confident, in the full joy of his power. He takes this story, which sounds like grim social realism, and tells it with music, humor, color and exuberant invention. A lot of it is just plain fun. He breaks completely away from realism in many places in the closeups of blacks, whites and Koreans chanting a montage of racial descriptions, and in the patter of the local disc jockey ( Samuel L. Jackson ), who surveys the street from his window and seems like the neighborhood's soundtrack. At other times, Lee makes points with deadpan understatement; there are two slow-motion sequences involving the way that people look at each other. One shows two cops and the three old black guys exchanging level gazes of mutual contempt. Another takes place when Sal speaks tenderly to Jade ( Joie Lee ), and the camera pans slowly across the narrowed eyes of both Mookie and Pino ( John Turturro ), one of Sal's sons. Neither one likes that tone in Sal's voice.

It is clear Sal has feelings for Jade, which he will probably always express simply by making her a special slice of pizza. He tells her what big brown eyes she has. Sal is sincere when he says he likes his customers, and he holds his head in his hands when Pino calls them “niggers” and berates a simpleminded street person. But in his rage Sal is also capable of using “nigger,” and for that matter the blacks are not innocent of racism either, and come within an inch of burning out the Koreans just on general principles.

Lee paints the people with love for detail. Notice the sweet scene between Mookie and Tina ( Rosie Perez ), the mother of his child. How he takes ice cubes and runs them over her brow, eyes, ankles, thighs, and then the closeup of their lips as they talk softly to one another. And see the affection with which he shows Da Mayor ( Ossie Davis ), an old man who tries to cool everyone's tempers. Da Mayor's scenes with Mother Sister ( Ruby Dee ) show love at the other end of the time line.

None of these people is perfect. But Lee makes it possible for us to understand their feelings; his empathy is crucial to the film, because if you can't try to understand how the other person feels, you're a captive inside the box of yourself. Thoughtless people have accused Lee over the years of being an angry filmmaker. He has much to be angry about, but I don't find it in his work. The wonder of “Do the Right Thing” is that he is so fair. Those who found this film an incitement to violence are saying much about themselves, and nothing useful about the movie. Its predominant emotion is sadness. Lee ends with two quotations, one from Martin Luther King Jr., advocating non-violence, and the other from Malcolm X, advocating violence “if necessary.” A third, from Rodney King, ran through my mind.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

Do the Right Thing (1989)

120 minutes

Danny Aiello as Sal

Ossie Davis as Da Mayor

Ruby Dee as Mother Sister

Richard Edson as Vito

Giancarlo Esposito as Buggin Out

Spike Lee as Mookie

Bill Nunn as Radio Raheem

John Turturro as Pino

Paul Benjamin as ML

Frankie Faison as Coconut Sid

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• Barry Alexander Brown

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Home — Essay Samples — Entertainment — Do The Right Thing — “Do the Right Thing”: Analysis of the Film’s Scene

"Do The Right Thing": Analysis of The Film's Scene

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Words: 866 |

Published: Mar 1, 2019

Words: 866 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

Table of contents

Introduction, analysis of cinematic elements in the chosen scene, works cited.

• Lee, S. (Director). (1989). Do the Right Thing [Film]. Universal Pictures.
• Miller, J. M., & Williams, T. R. (2012). Out of the Shadows: African American Protest and the Political Incorporation of the Disadvantaged. American Journal of Political Science, 56(3), 481-494.
• Hooks, B. (1992). Black Looks: Race and Representation. South End Press.
• Bogle, D. (2001). Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. Bloomsbury Academic.
• Delaney, S. (1995). Spike Lee: Interviews (Conversations with Filmmakers Series). University Press of Mississippi.
• Hutchings, P. (1995). The Poetics of Adaptation: Film Narrative and the Novel in Do the Right Thing. Film Criticism, 20(2), 4-24.
• Gray, H. (1996). The Politics of Race and Sexuality in Do the Right Thing. In The Black Film Center/Archive Research Bibliographies Series (Vol. 1, p. 7). Indiana University, Black Film Center/Archive.

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The Enduring Urgency of Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” at Thirty

By Richard Brody

Spike Lee’s third feature, “Do the Right Thing,” returns to movie theatres this weekend in honor of the thirtieth anniversary of its release. Lee dedicated the movie, in the end credits, to the families of Eleanor Bumpurs, Michael Griffith, Arthur Miller, Edmund Perry, Yvonne Smallwood, and Michael Stewart—six black people, five of whom were killed by police officers, as the character Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) is, in the film’s climactic scene. (Griffith was killed by a white mob.). Three decades later, with police forces virtually militarized and with the judicial system largely granting officers impunity for killings committed on duty, the shock of the movie is that, even as many cultural and civic aspects that it represents have changed, its core drama—the killing of black Americans by police—continues unabated and largely unredressed.

“Do the Right Thing” isn’t a comprehensive representation of a cross-section of Bedford-Stuyvesant, the Brooklyn neighborhood where it is set, but a vision of private lives with a conspicuous public component—a sense of community and of history that’s a crucial aspect of identity. The movie’s individuals are boldly sketched with expressive exaggerations, not characters with deeply developed psychology but ones who bear the marks, the scars, and the emblems of history, and who also bear the pressure of the white gaze, the police gaze. No less than Lee’s script, his aesthetic offers a sharply original way of looking at the lives of black people—and of looking at life at large from a black person’s perspective. “Do the Right Thing” is grand, vital, and mournful; it is also, crucially, proud, a work not only of the agony of history—and of present-tense oppressions—but also of the historic cultural achievements of black Americans, and it takes its own place in the artistic history that it invokes.

The movie’s bright palette, its sense of contrasts of light and color, its distinctive and prominent addresses by characters looking in high-relief and fish-eye closeup at the viewer, its sense of bold declamation and assertive movement: all suggest a personal sense of style that builds on the cinematically disjunctive methods of the nineteen-sixties. They also evoke a cultural history—visual, dramatic, and tonal—informed by such artists as Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin and John Coltrane. Lee’s artistic collaborations are central to the movie’s rich sense of an artistic gathering, including the cinematography of Ernest Dickerson, the production design, by Wynn Thomas, and the costume design, by Ruth E. Carter . The score was composed by Lee’s father, Bill Lee, a bassist who has recorded with many major jazz musicians and appears on a wide range of albums, including Clifford Jordan’s classic “ Glass Bead Games .”

“Do the Right Thing” starts where Lee’s 1988 film “School Daze” ends—with a call to “Wake up”—but here it comes through by way of local media and in the context of art. It begins with one of the cinematic voices of the era—with Samuel L. Jackson, in the role of Mister Señor Love Daddy, the d.j. of a radio station operating from a storefront perch, where he’s on the air, watching the streets and orchestrating its moods with music, reporting back on what he sees and inflecting the moment with musings that connect the music to the community at large. In one spectacular monologue, Mister Señor Love Daddy recites his list of dozens of classical black musicians whose records he plays, beginning with Boogie Down Productions and ending with Mary Lou Williams.

The cultural clash at the center of “Do the Right Thing” is one that foreshadows major changes in the recent media landscape. The fast-talking young man called Buggin Out (Giancarlo Esposito) goes to Sal’s pizzeria for a slice, where Sal (Danny Aiello), the sympathetic but hotheaded owner, has photos of celebrities assembled into a “wall of fame.” Buggin Out notices that all of the photographs are of Italian-Americans (including Frank Sinatra, Liza Minnelli, and Joe DiMaggio) and asks why there aren’t any photos of black stars, given that the pizzeria is in a mainly black neighborhood. Sal’s answer—“Get your own place, you can do what you want to do”—doesn’t, of course, satisfy Buggin Out, who tries to organize a boycott of Sal’s. It doesn’t work, but Radio Raheem—who has already incurred Sal’s wrath by refusing to turn down his boom box, playing Public Enemy, in the pizzeria—ultimately decides to join him. (Raheem’s musical passion is also reverently devotional; his gesture is a crucial symbolic act of a black customer bringing his culture into a white-owned space.)

“School Daze” was more overtly tough-minded and more analytical in its portrait of divisions within the student body at a historically black university. In “Do the Right Thing,” Lee depicts a different sort of division, one that’s of deep political import but isn’t directly dramatized: the apparent ideological division between Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, which echoes bitterly through the film’s final tragedy. It’s exemplified in Lee’s placement of a quote from each at the end of the film. Dr. King’s quote begins, “Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral”; Malcolm’s concludes, “I don’t even call it violence when it’s self-defense, I call it intelligence.” The division is both presented and symbolically resolved in the photo of the two leaders together that the character Smiley (Roger Guenveur Smith) decorates and sells—and which Lee puts on the screen after the two quotes.

Lee, as Mookie, the deliveryman for Sal’s, plays a role that symbolized his own position in Hollywood at the time, as an employee of a white-run business and a mediator between it and the black community. When Buggin Out first challenges Sal about the photos on the wall, Mookie walks him out of the pizzeria and admonishes him for putting his job in jeopardy. But after the murder of Raheem, Mookie—at first standing alongside Sal and his sons (John Turturro and Richard Edson) in confronting the crowd in the wake of the killing—walks off, grabs a metal trash can, returns, and throws it through Sal’s window. That action sets Mookie’s neighbors to ransacking the pizzeria—culminating in Smiley lighting the match that torches it, as the elderly woman called Mother Sister (Ruby Dee), wise and bitter and rueful, calls out, “Burn it down.” (She’s one of only three prominently featured women in the movie; there’s another virtual movie lurking behind this one, which pays more attention to the public role of women in the community.)

With “Do the Right Thing,” Lee was letting Hollywood know that it, too, was on the wrong side of history—and was doing not just wrong but harm. Nonetheless, what’s astonishing about the response of Raheem’s friends and neighbors to his murder isn’t the trashing of Sal’s; it’s their restraint—the handful of police officers manage to leave, dragging away Raheem’s body and arresting Buggin Out, with little incident. The rage directed at Sal, for his obtuseness and for his words and acts of hatred, is in its own way symbolic—the blood is on the hands of the police officers, who’d likely go unpunished. It’s their gaze at peaceable black people that foreshadows the trouble to come; it’s their derogatory remarks about the neighborhood, in private conversation with Sal, that suggest the hatred and contempt motivating their official behavior.

In “Do the Right Thing,” Lee—in challenging the cultural segregation of Sal’s wall—challenges the very nature of a public space as private property. Here, too, Lee evokes the burden and the responsibility of history. The very theme of private property in public space was a crucial one in the civil-rights movement, when white segregationists attempted to maintain a ban on black people in their restaurants and stores by asserting that the facility was their private property. The notion was overturned in the definition of “public accommodations” in the Civil Rights Act of 1964; but those laws had nothing to do with another sort of public space, the media as a crucial part of civic life; though the concept is now widely recognized, the practice is still woefully inadequate.

“Do the Right Thing” was released the same year as “Driving Miss Daisy,” which won the Oscar for Best Picture; Lee’s film wasn’t nominated. Today, the industry mainstream, or whatever’s left of it, is at least superficially more diverse, and sometimes substantially so, as with “Creed” and “ Black Panther .” But some things haven’t changed: Lee’s “ BlacKkKlansman ,” which was a Best Picture nominee this year, lost out to “ Green Book ,” another regressive tale of interracial friendship.

History virtually pierces the screen in one image from “Do the Right Thing” that’s unbearable to watch—a closeup of Raheem’s feet, kicking and dangling off the ground, while he’s being choked by the police. It’s an image that evokes a hanging and suggests a lynching; to watch it now is to see it in the context not just of a long and horrific history of acts of racist violence against black Americans but also of the police brutality that, thirty years after the film’s release, continues. “Do the Right Thing” is, regrettably, not a work of history but a film set, in many ways, in the present tense.

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By Awol Erizku

By John Colapinto

By Doreen St. Félix

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What I Saw Working at The National Enquirer During Donald Trump’s Rise

Inside the notorious “catch and kill” campaign that now stands at the heart of the former president’s legal trial.

Credit... Photo illustration by Pablo Delcan

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By Lachlan Cartwright

Lachlan Cartwright has been a journalist for 20 years. He is currently a special correspondent at The Hollywood Reporter covering media, entertainment and politics.

• April 3, 2024 Updated 4:46 p.m. ET

On Tuesday, April 4, 2023, I was outside Manhattan criminal court. It was a sunny spring day, and the Secret Service and the Police Department had blocked off the streets with barricades. The sidewalks were clogged with news crews from around the world. Supporters of Donald Trump roamed a pen that was set up to house them. Eventually, the former president was rushed out of the courthouse after being charged by Alvin Bragg, the district attorney of Manhattan, with 34 counts of falsifying business records. His convoy departed to cheers from fans.

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I pulled up the indictment and the statement of facts on my iPhone. At the center of the case is the accusation that Trump took part in a scheme to turn The National Enquirer and its sister publications into an arm of his 2016 presidential campaign. The documents detailed three “hush money” payments made to a series of individuals to guarantee their silence about potentially damaging stories in the months before the election. Because this was done with the goal of helping his election chances, the case implied, these payments amounted to a form of illegal, undisclosed campaign spending. And, Bragg argued, because Trump created paperwork to make the payments seem like regular legal expenses, that amounted to a criminal effort at a coverup. Trump has denied the charges against him.

The documents rattled off a number of seedy stories that would have been right at home in a venerable supermarket tabloid, had they actually been published. The subjects were anonymized but recognizable to anyone who had followed the story of Trump’s entanglement with The Enquirer. His affair with the porn star Stormy Daniels, of course, was the heart of it. There was also Karen McDougal, the Playboy Playmate of the Year in 1998, whose affair with Trump was similarly made to disappear, the payments for the rights to her story made to look like fees for writing a fitness column and appearing on magazine covers. (Trump has denied involvement with both women.) There were others that were lesser known, too, like Dino Sajudin, a former Trump World Tower doorman who claimed that Trump had a love child with one of the building’s employees; the story was never published, and Sajudin was paid $30,000 to keep quiet about it.

For me, reading the indictment was like stepping through the looking glass, because it described a three-year period in my own professional life, one that I have come to deeply regret. Dino the Doorman? During my time at American Media Inc. (A.M.I.), The Enquirer’s parent company, I was one of the editors pushing our reporters to confirm that story. McDougal’s fitness columns were published only after I instructed a colleague to work with the model to put them together. These were all pretty normal things to do during my time there, a life-changing detour in my career, which happened to coincide with a bizarre period at A.M.I., when it was allegedly enlisted — in some ways that I saw and in others that I didn’t — into the service of helping Trump become president. Now, as a former president faces a criminal trial for the first time in American history, I’m forced to grapple with what really happened at The Enquirer in those years — and whether and how I can ever set things right.

In a sense, it was Philip Seymour Hoffman who got me the job. In February 2014, while I was working at The New York Daily News, an editor there told me that Hoffman had been found dead in his West Village apartment. He asked for my help on the story. Our crime reporters tracked down the name of the person who found the body, David Bar Katz, a close friend of Hoffman’s and a playwright, but all our attempts to reach him had not borne fruit.

Soon, The National Enquirer hit newsstands with an “exclusive” interview with Katz. He said that he and Hoffman were “homosexual lovers” and that he watched Hoffman freebase cocaine the night before his death. The story quickly unraveled: The Enquirer had been talking to a David Katz, but this one was a freelance TV producer based in New Jersey. After being bombarded with calls from reporters — and consuming several beers, he later told The New York Post — he apparently decided to have some fun. The actual David Bar Katz sued A.M.I. for $50 million.

The magazine withdrew the story and settled out of court. In the end, The Enquirer took out a full-page ad in The New York Times acknowledging the error and paid Katz enough that he was able to establish an annual prize for playwrights in Hoffman’s honor. David Pecker, the chief executive of A.M.I., removed the top editor. In his place, Pecker pulled a young editor named Dylan Howard over from another A.M.I. publication, Radar Online.

Howard and I met a few years earlier in New York. He attended the same university I did in Melbourne, though we weren’t friends in Australia. Now, two Aussie journalists in New York, we swapped gossip and hit it off. I helped land him one of his biggest scoops; in 2010, I passed Charlie Sheen’s private cell number to him, and he figured out that texting Sheen when he was partying would get his attention. The two developed a rapport, and after a series of well-publicized meltdowns, Sheen invited Howard to Los Angeles to watch him take a drug test and reveal the results live on “Good Morning America.”

In March 2014, Howard and I started talking about the possibility of my coming to The Enquirer as his No.2. During a booze-fueled night at the Electric Room, a nightclub in the Meatpacking District, he walked me through the offer. A $60,000 bump in compensation — which worked out to a 75 percent raise. And I would be running a national news operation with the resources, he promised, to break agenda-setting stories.

I had never paid that much attention to the supermarket tabloids, but I knew enough to know what The Enquirer was. It published a sensational mix of celebrity scandal, true crime and “triumph over tragedy” real-life stories. It might not have been a respected newspaper, especially because of its tendency to print cover lines that stretched the truth to the breaking point. But it’s not as if it published stories about Bat Boy either. (That’s The Weekly World News.) The Enquirer’s reporters were fearless, and they did sometimes win the respect of the mainstream press. During the wrongful-death suit brought against O.J. Simpson by the parents of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, it was The Enquirer’s reporters who found photos of Simpson wearing Bruno Magli shoes, the same type that left prints in blood at the scene of the murders. The revelation helped a jury decide that Simpson could be held responsible for the deaths.

By the time I started, The Enquirer’s weekly newsstand-sales figures hovered around 360,000, down from a high of about four million in the 1990s. Still, even in recent years, The Enquirer had broken big stories. In fact, the tabloid most likely altered the course of the 2008 presidential election when it exposed John Edwards’s affair and love child with a campaign staff member. That investigation showed the muscle and drive of The Enquirer’s reporting. Stakeouts, door knocks, documents. Reporters flying across the country. Persisting until they got the story right. Howard told me that he wanted the magazine to land ambitious stories like that. “All things going well,” he texted me, a bit hyperbolically, “you and I will be youngest editors of a national US publication ever.”

I was agonizing over the offer when the editor in chief of The Daily News, Colin Myler, called me into his office. Myler presented me with a $10,000 raise and thanked me for my work. I thought he might have caught wind of the job offer, so I mentioned it to him. He said I would be making a big mistake if I went to work for David Pecker. Deep down, I was hoping Myler would make a counteroffer, but he didn’t. I took Howard on his word. Ultimately, my hubris sealed the deal.

I started as executive editor of The Enquirer and Radar Online in mid-May. What I soon learned is that Howard, even if he wanted to, wouldn’t be changing the operation; Pecker really ran the place. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings, there were “cover meetings,” when Howard and the editors of The Enquirer’s sister titles would go before Pecker and several of his top lieutenants to show a few options and analyze sales figures. If one title had a week-to-week decline, Pecker became apoplectic. I would walk through the back of the newsroom near Pecker’s office and hear him screaming through the walls. Sometimes Pecker would suggest a preferred cover line, forcing us to twist a story to fit the language. In that paranoid environment, all anyone cared about was not incurring Pecker’s wrath and being fired. (Pecker did not respond to requests for comment.)

A frustrating first year spent in a windowless office was suddenly interrupted on the afternoon of March 29, 2015, when a source told me about a woman named Ambra Battilana Gutierrez who went to the New York Police Department after being groped by Harvey Weinstein in TriBeCa. My pulse was racing — finally a worthwhile scoop. There had been rumors about Weinstein and women for years. Affairs, the “casting couch” and worse. I called Howard and was struck by his response: He seemed less interested in the story than in the identity of my source. (In response to questions from The Times, Howard said he was simply vetting the story’s sourcing, a routine part of his job duties.)

I could not figure out his attitude. But before we got any further, The Daily News broke the story, with the help of police sources. But Gutierrez still hadn’t spoken publicly, and Howard went into overdrive trying to buy her side of the story. The Enquirer, like many tabloids, sometimes paid sources for exclusive stories; this is not an acceptable practice in most newsrooms, or in the ones I’ve worked in since. Still, it seemed odd that we were trying to buy a story that we could have had free. “Cash really no object,” Howard messaged me, “so I can sling your source 5k to get it done in addition to her 20k.” But Gutierrez didn’t want $20,000. She wanted her story heard. And it continued to roll out in other outlets, through leaks from law enforcement and “movie industry” sources — who framed the matter in the media as a blackmail attempt.

Howard was in and out of my office asking for updates. “I think the stakes just increased,” he texted me, “and your source could earn some big bucks.” I texted the source saying that Gutierrez could ask for any amount of money and that the source could take a substantial cut. “She’s less concerned w money than the right moves,” the source responded. By the middle of the week, Howard told me to offer Gutierrez $150,000, with a $25,000 finder’s fee to my go-between — an extraordinary amount of money. Most stories we bought cost us about a few thousand dollars. (Howard says he was merely conveying offers at the direction of Pecker.) “She says no,” the source texted back, “don’t ask again.”

Unknown to me at the time, Weinstein had all but secured a guarantee that we would never report on his sexual transgressions. Earlier that year, the Weinstein Company signed a deal with A.M.I. to produce something called Radar TV. The plan was to take our celebrity coverage from Radar Online and use it to make a daily, live TV show in the mold of “Access Hollywood.” The deal entailed lots of lunches between Weinstein and Howard at Tribeca Grill but never resulted in an actual TV show. Still, the partnership did make Weinstein a “FOP” — Friend of Pecker — which entitled him to protection from negative coverage. He was also able to leverage his relationship with A.M.I. to use our vast news-gathering resources to collect dirt on the actresses who he thought might talk to the press.

The New York Post, The Daily Mail and other outlets painted Gutierrez as a gold-digger who had attended the “bunga bunga” parties of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy. Years later, I learned that one of A.M.I.’s top lawyers had informed someone in the office of Cy Vance, the Manhattan district attorney at the time, that Gutierrez was trying to sell her story to us . Vance’s office eventually announced that it would not pursue charges against Weinstein. (In the end, Gutierrez reached a settlement with Weinstein and went on to tell her story to the press.)

A couple of months later, Trump descended the escalator at Trump Tower. Editorial discussions about John Travolta, Lisa Marie Presley and Bill Cosby were now interspersed with chatter about Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. The headlines that resulted were not ambiguous.

“Why I am THE ONLY Choice For President EXCLUSIVE! DONALD TRUMP WRITES FOR THE ENQUIRER.” (He didn’t. A colleague cobbled the piece together, and Michael Cohen — Trump’s lawyer and go-between with A.M.I. — got Trump’s approval for it.)

“WHO’S CHELSEA’S REAL DAD? PREZ HOPEFUL HILLARY’S MOMENT OF TRUTH. EXCLUSIVE DNA TEST RESULTS BOMBSHELL.” (We had mounted an operation to collect Chelsea Clinton’s trash in an effort to get her DNA. But because Clinton lived in a big Manhattan apartment building, it was virtually impossible to get access to her garbage; we instead got a sample off a pen she used to sign a book. The results were inconclusive, but we published the story anyway.)

“HILLARY: 6 MONTHS TO LIVE!” Cruel Bill Forces Her To Stay On Campaign Trail.”

These covers came with doctored images of Clinton looking frail, bolstered by quotes from anyone who would say the right things and had a title that tenuously qualified him to offer an opinion. The Enquirer did employ real reporters who would comb through documents, cultivate sources and use old-school reporting techniques, but I was coming to terms with the other side of the magazine, where a headline was chosen and editors and writers spun up a tenuous story to match.

This all came on the heels of a family tragedy that made my job seem even more detestable and stupid. In the spring, my dad grew ill, and when he finally got to a doctor, irregularities were found in his blood. Stomach cancer. Stage 4. He was told he had three months to live.

I had a contentious relationship with him during my adolescence, and by 22 I had moved to London to pursue journalism. He and my mother would visit, but because I was gay and hiding this from them, it kept us distant. Soon after my younger brother came out, I asked my father how he was dealing with it. “It could be worse,” he told me. “We could have two of them.” When I finally came out several years later, my father took it in and asked me, “Are you sure you’re not bi?” It took a few years, but he came to terms with having two sons who weren’t straight. By the time of his 70th birthday, he had visited me in New York, and we ran around town like teenagers. He would tell me it was one of the best weeks of his life.

I landed back in Melbourne just in time. When I had last seen my dad a few months earlier, he was a fit 71-year-old. Now the color had drained from his skin. His voice was hoarse as we hugged. Just nine days after I landed, he was admitted to a palliative-care facility. He was unconscious, but we talked to him as if he were lucid. We all slept in his room. I lay awake and listened as his breaths got further and further apart. Just after 5 a.m. on May 1, 2015, he took his last.

I buried my father and returned to New York, dazed by grief. I cried in the shower before work. I sat blankly in editorial meetings. I don’t know how I would have responded to the events that followed had I not been so depressed. But the truth is that I was: I was drinking heavily, and life felt hopeless. I was angry. I became lazy. Even a little bit crazy.

In the fall, we got a startling tip over the transom from a former doorman at Trump World Tower, who said that Trump had an affair with a woman who worked in the building and that she had given birth to a secret “love child.” The tip line was a lot of fun but presented its fair share of headaches. Because we advertised that we paid for stories, we got all types of chancers and charlatans trying their luck. So we proceeded cautiously, not only because of that but also because we knew Trump was a FOP. Howard had to check with the boss before we could make any moves.

The word came back that we could proceed, and we quickly signed the tipster, Dino Sajudin, to a source contract that would pay $30,000 if we ran his story. We assigned a team of reporters to firm it up. Before any calls were made, we wanted to ensure that we had photos of both the woman and the “love child” in hand in case they went to ground. There was a stakeout at the home of the woman. Another reporter was sent to the address of the “love child.”

With photos of both secured, we arranged for Sajudin to sit for a polygraph. This was standard practice for stories that could draw legal action from a subject. We had two private investigators who would routinely conduct lie-detector tests on sources before we ran their stories. It was an extra layer of insurance, especially because The Enquirer was a constant target of lawsuits; a polygraph could demonstrate that we had gone above and beyond to confirm that a source was telling the truth. We would sometimes spike stories when sources failed polygraphs, but over time I came to feel that the tests were a cynical way of manufacturing a good-faith effort before publication.

Sajudin passed his polygraph, but it turned out that the information was secondhand: He had heard his colleagues talking about it and had no proof. He had serious credibility issues besides. If you ran his name through Google, you would find an anonymous website that accused Sajudin of making similar allegations about a Trump World Tower resident.

I could hear from Howard’s office that Michael Cohen was calling, and I assumed he was looking for updates. I had my doubts about the story, especially as the “love adult,” as I was now calling her (she was in her late 20s), looked just like the man named on her birth certificate, who was not Donald Trump. Then, out of nowhere, the order came to stand down.

Pecker made the call to pay Sajudin $30,000, and the story was killed without Howard explaining why. It was an enormous amount of money to pay someone, especially for a story we were not running. In December, a reporter met Sajudin at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania to present him with the check. In return, he signed a new contract that stipulated that if he told the story to any third parties, he would be on the hook for a million dollars in damages to A.M.I. It was a highly unusual clause. The signed contract was put into a safe. A colleague who was working with me described what happened as a “catch and kill.” It was the first time I had heard the phrase, but it would not be the last.

As we hurtled toward the presidential primaries, there was a laser focus on stories about Trump’s rivals. Ben Carson, we alleged, had left a sponge in a woman’s brain. Bernie Sanders we accused without any evidence of being caught in a “child sex probe.” Marco Rubio, or at least someone with a similar haircut, had been photographed at a “man fest foam party.” While I had serious misgivings about publishing stories like these — which took cues from sites like Infowars and The Gateway Pundit — it also felt totally meaningless: Would anyone take this stuff seriously? I also quieted my conscience by continuing to drink heavily, every night.

Ted Cruz was a major target. We ran thinly sourced stories that suggested that he was a raging alcoholic who had five secret mistresses and was named in a madam’s “black book.” And we ran a cover story linking his father, Rafael, to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. That article hinged on a grainy photo contained in the Warren Commission report purporting to show Lee Harvey Oswald handing out pro-Castro fliers with Rafael Cruz. The money quote came from a guy who ran a photo-digitization website who told the reporter with a “high degree of confidence” that it was the same person.

Then, much to everyone’s surprise — and my horror — the Cruz story was picked up by the mainstream media. Trump went on Fox News to repeat the claims, and the Cruz campaign was forced to respond. I watched in Howard’s office dumbfounded as Cruz denied the story on CNN.

I was eventually moved into a better office, one that had windows and an old safe about the size of a minifridge. The Sajudin contract was inside it, and I used it as a footrest. My old office, meanwhile, was littered with dozens of boxes that had been brought up from A.M.I.’s offices in Boca Raton, Fla. This was all the material the newsroom had collected on the Clintons over the decades. I was directed to hire a freelance researcher to go through them and generate memos so we could gin up hit pieces. The Enquirer had a similar archive of files on Trump — perhaps the most amazing trove of Trump material of any national media organization — but it was not receiving the same careful review.

Instead, I was going through the memos from the freelancer that provided the basis for spurious stories accusing Hillary Clinton of forming a “hit squad” to kill Vince Foster. Then we moved on to hyperbolic material on Bill Clinton and women. “HILLARY’S HIDING BILL’S SEX CRIMES! 36 WOMEN BREAK THEIR SILENCE” was the cover that landed in May 2016.

Between those were a drumbeat of fictitious health crises for the former first lady and presidential candidate. With the help of so-called medical experts — typically publicity-hungry pundits who understood what we wanted to hear — and the assistance of a talented art department, we tried to kill her off in print almost weekly. She would appear with her eyes made baggy and the colors in the images desaturated. In others, she swelled to fit the cover line that she had gained 103 pounds and was “Eating herself to death!” In another we purported to have her “FULL MEDICAL FILE!” which, as the cover screamed, said she had “3 strokes,” “Alzheimer’s,” “liver damage from booze” and “violent rages.”

We had another secret weapon: Michael Sylvestre. By day, Sylvestre worked at the Walt Disney Company, but at night he operated Truth and Deception Technologies in Florida. We would send Sylvestre audio clips of politicians or celebrities speaking, and after using software that he called DecepTech Voice Stress Analysis, he sent back charts at $500 per test. “HILLARY FAILED SECRET FBI LIE DETECTOR!” was one such cover. (We had no reason to believe DecepTech had been used by the F.B.I.) We went to him so often that I could signal that we required his services again by using a cranking hand motion.

In August, Howard told me he had met with a former Playboy Playmate named Karen McDougal, who said she had an affair with Trump. The woman was being represented by a lawyer, Keith Davidson, and Howard said he found her story credible. Howard told me that Pecker bought her story for $150,000 but that it would never see the light of day. It was the second catch-and-kill on Trump’s behalf that I heard about.

I started to avoid Howard as best as I could. Our interactions became icy, and colleagues in the newsroom started to notice. I felt as if I were being suffocated. And I feared that being near all of this would mean the end of my career.

Late in the afternoon on the Friday before the 2016 election, I received a call from Lukas Alpert, a Wall Street Journal reporter. He and I used to work together at The New York Post, and we kept in touch. He was on the media desk now but explained that he had been asked by a colleague on the investigative team for help on a story. Did I know anything about a woman named Karen McDougal?

I froze. I was in the newsroom and only feet from Howard. I told Alpert I would call him back. I walked to the elevator and rode it down to the entrance of the building. I explained the huge risk I was taking by helping him and the consequences if Pecker or Howard found out. I thought if I used an old-school tabloid term it would give me some cover; only the guys who had been there forever used that term.

“This was a catch-and-kill,” I told Alpert.

“What’s a catch-and-kill?” he asked.

I went on to explain the tabloid practice of buying stories to bury them. Alpert already had the outline of the story, I learned, and I filled him in on more: how Howard had flown out to Los Angeles that summer to buy McDougal’s story for $150,000, with the direction from Pecker to kill it to protect Trump. I stressed to him the importance of the term “catch and kill” and told him that if The Journal included it, it would give me some breathing room.

I went back to my office and closed the door. My heart was racing, and I was sweating. A short time later, Howard burst in.

“The Wall Street Journal has a story coming,” I recall him saying, before naming two former employees, blaming them for the leak. He slammed the door shut. The story went live after 9 that night. “National Enquirer Shielded Donald Trump From Playboy Model’s Affair Allegation.” And there it was in the third paragraph. “Quashing stories that way is known in the tabloid world as ‘catch and kill.’” I didn’t hear from Howard that weekend. No one thought Trump was going to win at that point, and the story was swallowed up in the pre-election frenzy.

That same week, I had finally hit my breaking point with the job. A few days earlier, Howard called me into his office. He explained that we would be crashing a late exclusive. He had obtained a seven-page dossier that contained what he said were emails between Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin, one of her longtime aides. The only snag was that the emails were in Italian, and we had just hours to get them translated if we wanted any chance of meeting our print deadlines.

Howard told me that Pecker had spent thousands of dollars to buy the file from a private investigator. Pecker was always paranoid about leaks and had paid this investigator’s firm to do sweeps of A.M.I.’s office looking for listening devices. And now, the investigator had become a source. (In response to questions from The Times, the investigator said he could not remember many details of this episode.)

The dossier, Howard explained, had come to our source via the Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Esterna — Italian intelligence, where the source apparently had connections. This is why the emails, though originally written in English, were in Italian. The agency had received the emails from Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the source said, which had itself hacked Clinton’s servers and obtained the emails from a laptop Abedin shared with her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner. Despite the many red flags and ethical questions that chain of custody raised, Howard believed in the dossier. And besides, Pecker had already decreed that this would be the cover story. The research team had found two New York University students to translate the documents. When they arrived, I was instructed to confiscate their cellphones.

The translators finished, and we managed to close the issue by midnight. “Hillary & Huma GOING TO JAIL!” was the cover line, with bullet points claiming, among other things, a “Secret hospitalization & truth about GAY AFFAIR!” (The translations in the article were totally garbled, and the inferences we made from them were absurd.) While it made its way to the printers, I went with Howard and some colleagues to White Horse Tavern — not the famous one, the one in the Financial District. He was buzzing with glee; I could barely look him in the eyes. I needed to get out, but I needed my visa to stay in the country and find another job. I held on to the thought that this would all soon be over. The election was just six days away. Clinton looked sure to win. Trump would fade away. I would be able to find my way out and back to actual journalism.

Instead, my duties somehow became even more depraved. When The Wall Street Journal contacted A.M.I. for comment about the $150,000 payment to Karen McDougal, the company claimed that the money was not to kill her story but rather to purchase her life rights to “any relationship she has had with a then-married man,” as well as two years of fitness columns and magazine covers. This had in fact been stipulated in the contract A.M.I. drew up with her lawyer, but now we had to actually come up with the columns. I assigned a reporter to ghostwrite them, and he got on a call with McDougal to take notes while cribbing fitness tips from the internet.

Alpert and his colleagues at The Journal were chasing fresh leads. I mentioned the doorman and the events of the previous year. Alpert asked for the names, so I opened the safe and got out the contract, which contained notes with the names of the woman and the “love adult.” I texted them to Alpert, put the documents back and went to close the safe. But the door wouldn’t shut. I tried desperately, but this rickety old safe refused to close. I was starting to panic. At any time, Howard could come in. I turned up the sound on my office TV as I sat hammering at this old metal door. Finally, the bloody thing shut.

After Trump won, I could not hide my utter contempt for Howard. My position as his deputy became untenable. By this point, the two of us were barely on speaking terms. I wasted my afternoons drinking alone in nearby bars and restaurants while I devised an exit strategy. I retained an employment attorney, knowing that both Howard and Pecker would love nothing more than to screw me on the way out. Howard was enraged by my behavior and made it known to others in the newsroom.

In July 2017, after weeks of negotiations, I was presented with a nine-page separation agreement. I would be kept on as an employee for the next nine months, collecting half my salary as a form of severance. That meant I would be able to continue living in the United States until my visa expired. But the price would be my silence: a nondisclosure agreement covering A.M.I. in general and Pecker in particular. The contract’s language was so broad that it prohibited me, in perpetuity, from even writing a work of fiction about my time at the company.

On Aug. 4, I entered the morning news meeting for the final time. Howard announced to the staff I would be “working from home” for the foreseeable future. I looked him in the eye and shook his hand. It would be the last time I saw him.

About six weeks after I left and around the time The New York Times and The New Yorker broke the Weinstein story, I was walking back to my apartment when I got a call from my attorney. A.M.I.’s lawyers had sent him a letter accusing me of breaching my nondisclosure agreement on three occasions. The letter threatened termination and damages, but it was the next sentence that got me. “In the event A.M.I. terminates Mr. Cartwright’s employment he will not be entitled to lawfully remain in the USA.” I vomited. They might not have known what I’d actually done, but it seemed they were trying to scare me into silence.

I resolved that if I was approached by a journalist whom I trusted and who I knew would protect me, I would do my best to help. Someone out there could do the work I should have been doing all along. A few weeks later, I received a direct message on Twitter from a New York Times reporter. I responded to him with my cell number and agreed to meet. I told the reporter what happened in 2015 with Gutierrez. I detailed Howard’s requests for damaging information on women connected to Weinstein, which usually followed their regular TriBeCa lunches. (Howard says he never asked Enquirer staffers to share damaging information on women connected to Weinstein.) But I stressed that the real story was The Enquirer’s work on behalf of Trump.

Eventually, I got a burner phone, as I was in almost daily contact with the reporter at The Times, my contact at The Journal and others. It was hard to keep them all straight. I emailed the New Yorker writer Ronan Farrow with the subject line “Signal.” “Are you on it?” I asked. He was in touch an hour later, and I began telling him what happened with Dino the Doorman.

It became clear to me that reporters from The Journal were in possession of information that could have come from only a small circle of people, and I feared that the source was Howard. If the reporters I had been talking to were incautious, they could have easily revealed to him that I had been a source, too. It would be the ammunition Howard needed to terminate my agreement and have me booted from the country. But on the other hand, if he was a source, how could he tell Pecker that he had learned I was, too? These paranoid thoughts kept me up at night.

I had heard A.M.I. sometimes tailed current and former employees. I became convinced that the same was happening to me. That might explain an incident that took place one evening when I went to Babeland, an adult store in SoHo, and walked out with a dildo, lubricant and condoms. As I exited the store, a car pulled up, and out jumped a man with a camera, who proceeded in the most indiscreet way to take a series of photos of me with a bright flash. Before I knew it, he had jumped back in the car, and it sped off. Were those photos going to be used to embarrass me? Was it a way to scare me?

With just weeks left on my visa, I had spent six months working free as a source, a self-imposed sentence for my many crimes against journalism. By this time I was in the late stages of interviews for a new job with The Daily Beast and an opportunity to resuscitate my byline.

Since I left A.M.I., I have lived under constant threat of litigation from my former employer. A.M.I. has threatened me with a $5 million lawsuit for breach of contract. (In 2020, A.M.I. was merged with another company and renamed A360 Media; A360 Media did not respond to requests for comment.) Howard has threatened me with another $5 million suit over articles I wrote for The Daily Beast, accusing me of defamation and breach of contract. But now the facts of what happened are a matter of public record, the basis for the first-ever criminal trial of a former president. Indeed, Pecker and Howard have already testified before Bragg’s grand jury. If they’re called again to testify at the trial, they will in all likelihood be revealing some of the same information they tried to intimidate me into withholding.

As I’ve tried to come to terms with just how corrupt an organization I worked for in those years, I’ve taken some comfort in the fact that acting as a source for other journalists helped rebalance the scales — not only for me but for the public too. After the last legal threat Howard sent me, in October 2020, a lawyer representing me wrote a strongly worded letter in response, arguing that the information I shared was “in the public interest” and “in some cases, it was of profound national importance.” The letters stopped; no suits have been filed. Three years after leaving the building for the last time, I finally felt free of the place.

Then the Bragg indictment outlined, in plain and unafraid black and white, the schemes that felt so opaque and contentious and complex when I had to navigate my way through them in real time. But it was the 13-page statement of facts that brought me to tears. On Page 3, prosecutors outlined “The Catch and Kill Scheme to Suppress Negative Information,” and it revealed to me that I had been managing a newsroom with improvised explosive devices planted everywhere. The secret deal that was made at Trump Tower, where Pecker told Cohen he would act as the campaign’s “eyes and ears.” The hush-money payoffs. The plot to publish negative stories about Trump’s rivals. A scheme to influence the 2016 election.

Everything finally fit into place. There were no more secrets, and I wasn’t alone anymore. Everyone now knew.

Lachlan Cartwright is a special correspondent for The Hollywood Reporter. He has been a journalist for 20 years, reporting from Australia, London and New York.

Photo credits for top image: Gabe Ginsberg/FilmMagic/Getty Images (Daniels); Andrew Burton/Getty Images (Trump); Santiago Felipe/WireImage/Getty Images (Weinstein); Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images (Clinton).

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