After the April 9 FBI raid on the office, home and hotel room of Michael Cohen, the world learned that Donald Trump’s personal attorney and fixer had allegedly arranged a payout to hide an affair in the final months of 2017.

But this affair didn’t involve Trump — or that’s how the story was reported.

The Wall Street Journal and New York Times reported that Cohen had negotiated a $1.6 million payment to a Playboy Playmate on behalf of Elliott Broidy, a top GOP fundraiser who played a key role in helping Trump raise money ahead of the 2016 election.

According to the story, the $1.6 million went to Shera Bechard, a former girlfriend of Hugh Hefner. In 2017, Bechard claimed that she had become pregnant from an affair with Broidy. In a statement, Broidy apologized to his wife and family while acknowledging the affair.

Broidy, a 62-year-old Los Angeles venture capitalist, told the New York Times that Brechard “alone decided that she did not want to continue with the pregnancy, and I offered to help her financially during this difficult period.”

But now a law professor lays out a case in New York magazine that questions this account of why Broidy paid $1.6 million to Brechard. The University of Colorado professor, Paul Campos, asks whether it was Trump, not Broidy, who had the affair with Bechard and, if that’s the case, whether the hush money payment was intended to protect Trump.

“Let me offer an alternative explanation of the affair and the payoff,” writes Campos, an author who has also published stories in the Atlantic and Business Insider. “It is still just a hypothesis, but, I would argue, it fits more comfortably with what we know about the various players than the reported version of events.”

Questions about the reported Broidy-Bechard arrangement have heated up since Trump’s new lawyer Rudy Giuliani began going on national television to reveal details about Cohen’s possible arrangements with the president and the president’s paramours.

Giuliani, for example, told Fox News host Sean Hannity on his show last week that the president had reimbursed Cohen for the $130,000 he paid to buy the silence of porn star Stormy Daniels. Daniels has said that she and Trump had a sexual encounter after meeting at a Lake Tahoe celebrity golf tournament in July 2006.

For months, Trump and his administration have denied that he knew anything about a settlement with Daniels; Trump continues to deny that he and Daniels ever had sex.

Then on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, Giuliani acknowledged that Cohen may have paid off other women on Trump’s behalf to keep quiet about affairs. When asked about other payments, Giuliani said he had no specific knowledge but said, “I would think if it was necessary, yes.”

In his essay for New York, Campos offers up his arguments for why the Broidy-Bechard arrangement at least merits a closer look.

Daniels’ attorney Michael Avenatti agrees that the arrangement should face increased scrutiny and probably will if the FBI seized documents related to the Broidy-Bechard NDA in their April 9 raid.

Avenatti told Campos, “There are considerable and serious questions as to this alleged settlement. Many things about it simply do not appear to add up or pass the smell test.”

Here is a summary of Campos’ primary arguments regarding the settlement, but you can read more in detail at New York magazine.

Another sketchy Michael Cohen nondisclosure agreement

The Broidy-Bechard situation involves the use of a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) that is eerily similar to the agreement Cohen used to arrange the hush money payout to Daniels, Campos said. Both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal said the contract did not use the signatories’ real names but the pseudonyms David Dennison and Peggy Peterson. These are the same pseudonyms used in the Stormy Daniels NDA to refer to Trump and Daniels.

Under the agreement, the payment from Dennison (Broidy) to Peterson (Bechard) was delivered through the same LLC created by Cohen to facilitate payments in the Daniels deal, Campos added.

As with Daniels before the 2016 election, Bechard was represented in her negotiations with Cohen by attorney Keith Davidson. He’s the same lawyer who represented Karen McDougal, another former Playboy Playmate. Just before the 2016 election, McDougal agreed to sell her story about her alleged months-long affair with Trump to the National Enquirer. The publisher of the Enquirer is a friend and supporter of Trump’s, and his company bought McDougal’s story for $150,000 in order to kill it rather than publish it, the New Yorker reported.

Broidy had no reason to pay so much to cover up an affair — so why would he?

The 62-year-old Broidy is married but no one, outside of his wife and family, would care that he had an affair with a Playboy Playmate — certainly not enough for him to pay out $1.6 million to buy her silence, Campos argues.

Meanwhile, the three-time-married Trump is known for his friendship with Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, his visits to the Playboy Mansion and his obsession with surrounding himself with Playboy Playmates, beauty pageant contestants and other pretty young women.

“Bechard was actually at one time Hefner’s girlfriend, while Trump and Hefner’s friendship mysteriously came to an end in 2016,” writes Campos.

In 2017, the new president could have been worried that news about a pregnant mistress and an abortion would damage his core support among Evangelical Christians, Campos argues.

At the same time, Bechard reportedly showed no proof to Broidy that she was pregnant by him, or that she was even pregnant at all, Campos said, citing the Wall Street Journal report.

“Under these circumstances, a seven-figure hush-money payment seems hard to explain,” Campos added.

But Campos speculates that Broidy could still have paid $1.6 million to Bechard to curry favor with Trump for his own business interests. Campos sees a good reason for why Broidy would have been willing to take both the financial and public relations hit that came with paying off Bechard.

“By stepping up to take responsibility for the affair and to fund the seven-figure settlement, Broidy was ensuring that he could continue to peddle his influence with Trump to governments around the world,” Campos writes.

The P.R. hit came quickly. After the revelation about his payment to Bechard became public, he resigned from the Republican National Committee, where he, along with Cohen, was a deputy finance chair.

But Broidy’s decision to take this hit would have fit with his own history of dealing with officials, Campos said. In March 2018, Broidy became the subject of “a slew” of national stories about his efforts to market his connections to Trump to politicians and governments around the world, Campos said.

But long before, Broidy had established a history of bribing public officials to enhance the economic prospects of his business ventures, Campos added. Notably, Broidy pleaded guilty in 2009 to paying $1 million in brides to officials with the New York State Comptroller.

Andrew Prokop, who writes about politics for Vox.com, also pointed out on Twitter that Broidy previously paid off the girlfriend of the official he was bribing.

Elliott Broidy even has a history of paying off the girlfriend of the public official he is bribing. https://t.co/RkyYJGYTAG pic.twitter.com/pmt6mJa6o7 — Andrew Prokop (@awprokop) May 8, 2018

A 2009 press release from the New York Attorney General’s office said Broidy paid more than $90,000 to the girlfriend. The payments in April 2004 and 2005 were used to cover the girlfriend’s living expenses and hospital bills.

Campos emphasizes that the size of the payment to Bechard — $1.6 million — “is a little weird.”

“Broidy was a largely anonymous person in late 2017, when the NDA was signed,” he continued. “His biggest claim to fame at the time was a felony conviction for corruption. Why would a man in his position need to pay $1.6 million to keep Bechard quiet about an affair to which the public at large would be completely indifferent?”