Eight years ago, in the spring of 2016, reporters in New York City began to hear whispers about a drama unfolding at the Midtown headquarters of NBC. Sources, colleagues, friends, and acquaintances: All of them had heard something about the relationship between Today Show co-host Tamron Hall and presidential candidate Donald Trump.

The rumor went like this: In the latter half of 2015, NBC journalists unearthed evidence that Hall and Trump conducted an affair in the years before he declared his candidacy. Some of the evidence indicated that Hall became pregnant by Trump and later obtained an abortion. The whispers appeared to be leaking out of 30 Rockefeller Plaza because NBC officials were unsure of how to address the situation.

Eager to scoop a competitor on its own turf, reporters outside of NBC swarmed their sources within the network for information. But they struggled to find a path to publication. Important details were fuzzy or disputed, and sources’ knowledge was often third- or fourth-hand. The gravity of the allegation, and the visibility of its subjects, provided little margin for error. Any story would require nearly perfect sourcing. No news outlet published a single word about the rumor.

But there was, in fact, some truth to it. According to people familiar with the matter, NBC journalists did indeed investigate Hall and Trump’s relationship in the fall of 2015, and found evidence that supported the existence of an affair that led to Hall’s pregnancy and subsequent abortion. They had gathered this material as part of a larger reporting project about Trump’s past girlfriends. The evidence was compelling enough to continue investigating as Trump’s campaign gained steam.

However, nothing ever came of the reporting project. NBC never published a story about Trump’s ex-girlfriends or his relationship with Hall. And, less than two weeks after Trump’s inauguration, Hall abruptly left the network. These events created a mystery that has never been solved: What exactly happened between Trump, Hall, and NBC?

This is my attempt to answer this question. Below, I’ve assembled a timeline of relevant facts, gathered from public sources and my own reporting, about Tamron Hall, Donald Trump, and NBC. I also sought on-the-record comment from all three subjects. You can see what they said, or did not say, at the end of the story.

Finally: If you believe anything in this story is missing or incorrect, or wish to share any information with me, you can email me here.

Timeline of facts

2002 - 2015

In June 2002, Trump announced a $50 million agreement with NBC to air three beauty pageants on the network: Miss Universe, Miss U.S.A., and Miss Teen U.S.A. The deal gave NBC a 50% stake in Trump’s pageant business.

On January 8, 2004, NBC debuted The Apprentice, a reality TV competition in which Trump presided over a group of aspiring business executives who competed for the chance to lead one of Trump’s many business ventures.

In July 2007, Hall joined NBC and MSNBC as a reporter and substitute anchor.

On August 23, 2010, Hall served as a judge for the Miss Universe pageant in Las Vegas, Nevada.

On September 9, 2010, Hall interviewed Trump on MSNBC to promote the new season of The Apprentice. The journalist Alissa Krinsky transcribed a portion of their exchange for TVNewser:

“Congratulations, Tamron,” Trump began. “I hear you’re getting a new show, and it’s a biggie!” Hall, who was a judge for Trump’s Miss Universe pageant last month, laughed, “Oh, I don’t know about that!”

“It’s very impressive,” Trump continued. “You're the opposite of the people that are on The Apprentice — you’re going up! So that’s great, congratulations.”

“You’re very kind to say that, very kind. Thank you,” said Hall, before quickly re-directing the conversation.

On October 11, 2010, MSNBC debuted Hall’s own show, NewsNation with Tamron Hall.

On December 2, 2011, Hall interviewed Trump about his plan to serve as a moderator for an upcoming debate, on the news channel Newsmax, among Republican candidates for the 2012 presidential campaign. Trump canceled his appearance nine days later.

On February 24, 2014, Hall joined The Today Show, the flagship morning program of NBC, as a co-anchor of the show’s third hour, alongside Willie Geist, Natalie Morales, and Al Roker.

On March 13, 2014, Trump appeared on Today, where Hall and co-host Matt Lauer interviewed him about the upcoming Miss USA pageant in Baton Rouge, his thoughts about Russia’s recent occupation of Crimea, and speculation about whether he would run for governor of New York. (Hall was a fill-in for Lauer’s regular co-anchor, Savannah Guthrie.) Trump appeared alongside the prior year’s winner of Miss USA, Erin Brady.

On June 16, 2015, Trump formally announced his candidacy for president of the United States in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York City. During that announcement, Trump said: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. … They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

On June 29, 2015, NBC severed ties with Trump, citing his earlier comments about Mexican immigrants: “Due to the recent derogatory statements by Donald Trump regarding immigrants, NBCUniversal is ending its business relationship with Mr. Trump.”

2016

On February 9, 2016, Hall conducted a 10-minute-long interview with Trump at a hotel bar in downtown Manchester, New Hampshire, where Hall and her NBC colleagues were covering the state’s presidential primary. From that interview:

HALL: So the question is, who is the real Donald Trump? Is he the guy saying the p-word where he knows he can get away with it at this ruckus rally, or is he the guy thumping the Bible because he needs that group? And then will he be the guy later in a general election who becomes the New York liberal that Ted Cruz says you are really hiding under your suit?

TRUMP: OK, so, I’ll tell you who the real Donald Trump is. I am the one that is going to make America great again. That’s what it is. We have politicians, they’re all talk, they’re no action, they’re destroying our country. We owe $19 trillion, we’re going to owe $21 trillion within a very short period of time because of the really stupid budget that they just passed. The real Donald Trump is going to turn it around and make America great again. That’s what the real Donald Trump is.

On March 2, anonymous members of the notorious web forum 4chan gained access to the voicemail inbox associated with Trump’s personal cell phone number. The 4chan members extracted thirty-five voicemail messages from Trump’s inbox; four of the messages were left by Hall. You can listen to the audio of Hall’s voicemails here. The next day, the anonymous 4chan members provided Gawker with copies of Trump’s voicemails.

On March 4, Gawker published three of Hall’s voicemail messages:

In one of the voice messages, [Hall] tells Trump that she was “happy I took your advice” and met with someone named “Matt.” The meeting went well, she says: “I celebrated by going to Gucci, and I’m going to use your discount, because there’s a green dress that’s like $3,000, and I need a discount bigger than the one—my discount.” …

In another message, she expresses her disapproval of an unnamed YouTube video with which Trump was apparently associated. “I saw the YouTube video today. I wanted to chat with you about it, since you know that I’m a huge fan, and I think the world of you. But I think that thing today was not good—not becoming of who I think you are as a person, as a statesman, like your award. I just thought it was just kind of crummy,” she says. …

The hackers released four voicemail messages from Hall. Taken together with her interviews, they suggest an anchor who has two relationships to Trump—a friendly personal one and an antagonistic journalistic one. To her credit, Hall’s apparent friendship with Trump hasn’t stopped her from covering him critically and aggressively.

On April 2, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd published an edited interview with Trump, in which Dowd asked whether the candidate had been “involved,” as a bachelor, with someone who obtained an abortion. Trump refused to answer the question:

In an MSNBC interview with Chris Matthews, the formerly pro-choice Trump somehow managed to end up to the right of the National Right to Life Committee when he said that for women, but not men, “there has to be some form of punishment” if a President Trump makes abortion illegal. Trump quickly recanted and even told CBS’s John Dickerson that “the laws are set. And I think we have to leave it that way.”

“This was not real life,” he told me. “This was a hypothetical, so I thought of it in terms of a hypothetical. So that’s where that answer came from, hypothetically. Given his draconian comment, sending women back to back alleys, I had to ask: When he was a swinging bachelor in Manhattan, was he ever involved with anyone who had an abortion?

“Such an interesting question,” he said. “So what’s your next question?”

On November 14 — six days after Trump defeated Hillary Clinton — Slate published a story titled, “Do You Have Information About Abortions Trump May Have Paid For? Let Us Know.”

2017

On February 1, 2017, Hall departed both NBC and MSNBC, for reasons that neither Hall nor NBC fully explained. Both Page Six and People magazine reported that Hall decided to exit the network after learning her 9 AM slot on Today would be replaced by former Fox News host Megyn Kelly.

The timing of Hall’s departure, just twelve days after Trump’s inauguration, drew renewed scrutiny from the reporters who previously investigated her history with Trump. Those reporters hypothesized that, if the Hall-Trump-NBC rumor were in fact true, some or all of the parties may have agreed to a non-disclosure agreement that constrained them from publicly or privately discussing the other parties.

The reporters acknowledged, however, that such an agreement would be untenable for a news anchor. Indeed, Hall continued to anchor news segments about Trump through the end of her employment at NBC. If an agreement existed, it must have been signed at or very close to the end of her contract at NBC. To test their hypothesis that neither Hall nor Trump would mention the other, the reporters set up systems, through Google Alerts and Lexis Nexis, to notify them of any article or transcript that mentioned both of their names.

On March 17, A.J. Benza, a former gossip columnist for the New York Daily News, hosted “Friday Night Special,” a recurring segment on the Los Angeles talk-radio station KABC. Benza discussed Trump’s nascent presidency, his own fractious friendship with Trump, and the 1996 murder of Tupac Shakur, among other subjects. You can listen to the entire segment here. (The original segment aired for two hours, between 8 P.M. and 10 P.M. Pacific. The online version is half as long because it omits commercial breaks.)

Not long after the segment started, at 14:33 in the online copy, Benza told his listeners: “If you really want to get to Trump, if you want him to make a mistake—this goes out to every reporter out there—let him keep talking. Don’t put words in his mouth. Let him talk. He’ll hang himself. Trust me. The guy’s about to say some crazy stuff.” He continued: “On the other end of this break, I’m going to tell you a really crazy story I heard about Trump that I know to be true.”

After taking several listener calls to discuss whether or not the media hates Trump, Benza told the “really crazy story” (at the timestamp 28:40):

Even though I’m not a practicing journalist, I still get stories … I haven’t put this anywhere yet, but it’s a hell of a story and it's a lot more interesting than when Donald Trump didn’t shake Angela Merkel’s hand. You know Tamron Hall? … My sources, who are in and around NBC, tell me that there was a big investigation for awhile on Trump’s girlfriends, who he was with, et cetera, and what they turned up was Tamron Hall was dating Donald Trump in 2012, when he was married to Melania. … He was with Tamron Hall. And apparently there were incriminating emails, with ‘I love you’ on them. … She used his discount at Gucci.

Interestingly enough, Tamron Hall, who’s got a great career … a couple of weeks ago she leaves The Today Show—she walks off the NBC show. The reason they gave was [that] Megyn Kelly was coming and Tamron felt like she was pushed away. I don’t buy that. I don’t buy that. I’m thinking more along the lines of, ‘Does NBC want to be embarrassed again?’ NBC feels a little guilty, looking back at The Apprentice … They don’t want one more piece of embarrassment.

I think Tamron kind of walked away before because maybe she was told, ‘Listen, this is going to get ugly. We have information.’ And in fact, that story goes deeper, but I’m not going to say what I want to say, on this type of show. But you can read between the lines: They were dating. They were doing stuff. Sometimes things happen. And you gotta go someplace, to take care of things. It’s that kind of story. I don’t want to say anymore than that.

On October 14 — nearly seven months after A.J. Benza appeared on KABC — someone using the pseudonym “Rupert Pupkin” summarized what Benza had said about Hall and Trump, in a brief post on an online forum operated by Radio Gunk, a weekly podcast about The Howard Stern Show. Under the title “A.J. Benza Claims Donald Trump Impregnated NBC’s Tamron Hall,” Pupkin wrote:

He asserts that Trump and Melania have an “agreement” and that he was “dating” Tamron Hall in 2012 and knocked her up. (28-29 minute mark) she was using Trumps “Discount” at stores in Manhattan and was pushed out by the network.

Pupkin’s post attracted forty-two replies from twenty-five different users. “A.J. better have something good to back this up if Trump decides to sue,” one wrote. “That’s a very bold claim.” Another added: “I don’t believe the Hall stuff; the media would have been ALL over it, but A.J. … is the one guy with the bombshell scoop, and he sat on it until after the election? Please.” The same commenter noted that Benza accused Trump of “stealing” his girlfriend in 2001.

The post on Radio Gunk marked the first written record on the searchable Internet of the rumor concerning Hall, Trump, and NBC. This triggered the Google Alerts that reporters’ had set up to find websites that mentioned both Hall and Trump, thereby renewing another round of inquiry about the rumor.

2018 - 2024

On September 1, 2018, White House correspondent April Ryan published her second memoir, Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White House. Ryan’s book drew reporters’ attention because it exclusively pertained to the author’s experience as a journalist covering the Trump administration, and because it contained a short preface written by Tamron Hall. Notably, Hall’s preface does not mention Trump by name or implication. One passage reads:

The day she went “viral” with the head-shake heard ’round cable news, social media and eventually global news was just one of April’s defining moments. The heated exchange defined her spirit, but not her struggle and her gracious tenacity that not only got her to dance, but kept her feet moving no matter what was thrown her way.

This did not prove, but appeared to be consistent with, the existence of a non-disclosure agreement in force between Tamron Hall and Donald Trump.

On September 9, 2019, ABC aired the first episode of Hall’s new daytime talk show, Tamron Hall.

On September 15, 2019, the original Radio Gunk thread from 2017 received twenty-four new comments over the next two days. It is not clear why. The thread’s author, Rupert Pupkin, updated the first entry with a short note and embedded an audio player of the episode: “Since someone decided to bump this 2-year old post, here is an easier to use link to listen to the show.”

On December 11, 2020, Hall interviewed Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg about a variety of topics, including Facebook’s decision not to remove a Facebook post authored by Trump that said, in response to protests over the death of George Floyd, “Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Hall began her line of questioning about Trump’s post at 3:38, and mentioned Trump by name at 5:49.

The Sandberg interview was notable because it appeared to be the first time Hall publicly mentioned Trump by name since she left NBC in 2017. And she did so only once during the entire exchange; every other time, she referred to Trump as “the president” or “the president of the United States.”

Hall hasn’t mentioned Trump since the Sandberg interview. If you search for the former president’s name on the official website of Tamron Hall, you will receive a list of five videos. Three of them tangentially refer to Donald Trump, such as an interview with an author about “spreading revolutionary love in the post-Trump era.” The remaining two refer to Melania Trump.

Request for comment

None of the subjects of this story—Tamron Hall, Donald Trump, and the corporate entity of NBC—responded to repeated requests for comment.

Hall is represented by the public-relations firm Align and the law firm Gang, Tyre, Ramer, Brown & Passman. Neither acknowledged emails and phone calls seeking comment. Emails sent to Trump’s presidential campaign, including the Protonmail address of chief spokesman Steven Cheung, went unreturned. In the course of my reporting, I obtained Trump’s personal cell phone number, which I called on Wednesday night. Trump answered. After I introduced myself, and said I was writing about his history with Hall, he immediately disconnected the call.

Finally, NBC employs at least eighteen publicists to respond to press inquiries about NBC News and MSNBC. None of them responded to numerous emails and phone calls seeking comment.

If you know anything more about this story, you can email me at trotterblog1@gmail.com or message me on Signal at trotter.02. If you want to receive future updates, please subscribe to my newsletter.

There is a journalist, here in New York City, whom I’ve followed and admired for the past decade. They have written, and contributed to, many enjoyable and interesting stories. They are talented, popular, and professionally successful. And, like many of their media peers, they operate a Twitter feed where they promote their work, crack jokes, and share wry observations about life in the big city.

One of the journalist’s longest-running comedic bits consists of bragging about driving a car in the city, about violating various laws with that car, about their desire to make the city more accommodating to cars. They have joked about parking in front of fire hydrants and driving around without the right inspection stickers. In one post, they joked about receiving a ticket for speeding.

I have been fascinated by the tension between this journalist’s remarkable accomplishments and their stated driving habits. Why would someone blessed with so much talent and success also engage, or purport to engage, in such antisocial behavior?

The situation raises a couple of interrelated questions: How did the journalist become this way? What does it even mean to be a bad driver in New York? And just how bad of a driver is this particular journalist?

How the journalist arrived at the strange intersection of personal prosperity and vehicular lawbreaking is a story for someone else to write. And the question of what constitutes a bad New York driver is difficult to answer without a concrete example to examine. That leaves us with the last question: Just how poorly does the journalist drive?

Based on the journalist’s posts, I already knew their car’s make, model, and year. New York City’s property database, ACRIS, told me the journalist had semi-recently purchased property in the city. With that address in hand, I hopped on the subway and, thirty minutes later, began to comb the journalist’s neighborhood for their parked car. Within forty-five minutes, I found it.

The (legally) parked vehicle was the correct make, model, and year. Its rear license plate holder advertised a car dealership based near the city where the journalist attended college. Beneath the plate holder was a bumper sticker from a lifestyle brand that the journalist talks about all the time. Through the back window, I could see two objects that were consistent with the journalist’s biography.

Behind the windshield, on top of the dashboard, lay a vehicle inspection report that had been printed out at an automobile shop seventeen days prior. The report said the car had passed its safety test but failed its emissions test:

Emissions result:

Readiness: Fail

Monitor EVAP: Not Ready

Monitor Secondary Air: Not ready

“PLEASE BE ADVISED,” the report continued, “Your vehicle’s on-board computer system is not ready to be tested. The on-board computer system is not ready to make a determination regarding the condition of the pollution control system on the vehicle.” In the report’s left margin, someone had scribbled in pencil: “Please have mercy! Dealing with inspection.” This detail matched the journalist’s posts about their car.

I then ran the journalist’s license plate through How’s My Driving NY, a website created by the programmer Brian Howald to aggregate violation data generated by local traffic police and fixed speed cameras.

Between 2019 and 2021, the journalist paid five tickets written by traffic cops: three for failing to display an up-to-date registration or inspection sticker, and two for failing to move the car for street cleaning. Between 2022 and 2024, the journalist paid seventeen tickets: seven for missing stickers, five for parking in front of a fire hydrant, four for street cleaning, two for speeding, and one for violating posted parking rules. One of the speeding tickets lined up exactly with an incident that the journalist described on Twitter.

Here is a table of the journalist’s tickets:

So is the journalist a bad driver? I have heard the charitable argument that New York is such a difficult city for drivers that it is effectively impossible to avoid violating the law, every single day. I do not find this convincing. It is also unclear why an improperly registered car that is unable to pass an emissions inspection should be driven on any street of any city. The whole idea behind routine vehicular inspections is to make driving safer. And the addition of two speeding tickets suggests to me that the journalist really ought to take remedial driving lessons before driving again in New York City.

But perhaps I am wrong and the journalist is in fact one of the city’s better drivers. This goes to the heart of the mystery: Is being a bad driver a relative status or an absolute one? What is the threshold at which someone should stop driving?

If you have thoughts on this mystery, there are two ways to contact me:

Email: trotterblog1@gmail.com

Signal: trotter.02

You can also yell at me on Twitter here: @jktrotter

In October 2018, Bloomberg Businessweek published a major story that claimed the F.B.I. was investigating whether the Chinese military had planted illicit microchips on networking equipment manufactured by an Oregon company called Supermicro. This would have been a huge deal, because the U.S. military, the C.I.A., and companies like Amazon and Apple had been using Supermicro’s hardware for years—and were now apparently vulnerable to a novel form of espionage. Bloomberg packaged the investigation as “The Big Hack.”

With its involvement of microscopic components and international supply chains, the story suggested that China had achieved a degree of technological sophistication unknown to any other government. One expert told the outlet: “Having a well-done, nation-state-level hardware implant surface would be like witnessing a unicorn jumping over a rainbow. Hardware is just so far off the radar, it’s almost treated like black magic.”

If you were a journalist in 2018, you may remember what came next: Both the U.S. and China politely disputed certain parts, while the private companies issued thundering denials of the story’s entire thesis. Part of Apple’s statement reads, “No one at Apple has ever heard of this investigation. [Bloomberg] has refused to provide us with any information to track down the supposed proceedings or findings. … Bloomberg’s reporters have not been open to the possibility that they or their sources might be wrong or misinformed.”

But Bloomberg’s sources seemed legitimate. The original story said:

The companies’ denials are countered by six current and former senior national security officials … one of those officials and two people inside [Amazon] provided extensive information on how the attack played out … the official and one of the insiders also described Amazon’s cooperation with the government investigation. In addition to the three Apple insiders, four of the six U.S. officials confirmed that Apple was a victim. In all, 17 people confirmed the manipulation of Supermicro’s hardware and other elements of the attacks. The sources were granted anonymity because of the sensitive, and in some cases classified, nature of the information.

I don’t have special knowledge of Bloomberg’s sources, but it’s very hard to believe that they don’t exist or that Bloomberg deliberately misrepresented their claims about Supermicro. In any normal newsroom, this kind of story would be seen by many editors, including and especially the editor-in-chief; some of those editors would be aware of the sources’ identities. Nobody at Bloomberg, officially or not, has ever claimed otherwise.

Bloomberg runs a fairly normal and successful newsroom. It offers some of the highest salaries in the media industry, and is famous for its thick manual of editorial standards, The Bloomberg Way. Its journalists are poached from, and poached by, other mainstream outlets. The reporters on the Supermicro story, Jordan Robertson and Michael Riley, came from the Denver Post and the Associated Press, respectively. Among journalists, Bloomberg carries a reputation of scrupulousness, not recklessness.

So it wasn’t totally surprising when Bloomberg refused to retract the story, entered “The Big Hack” for consideration by the National Magazine Awards, and later promoted Riley. The outlet issued the same statement, over and over again: “We stand by our story and are confident in our reporting and sources.”

There are reasons to be skeptical of Bloomberg’s confidence. One networking expert, Patrick Kennedy, has argued that the illicit microchips’ alleged capabilities are either implausible or impossible, given the geometric constraints of existing technology at such a small scale. But there are also reasons to extend the benefit of the doubt. One is that Bloomberg editors heavily scrutinize stories that may impugn the government of China, due to the Bloomberg Terminal’s presence in the Chinese market. Bloomberg does not paint China in a negative light unless it has a very good reason to do so.

All of this leaves us with the central mystery: Is Bloomberg’s story true, or not? And is it possible to determine its accuracy to the satisfaction of everyone involved?

This is a one-person newsletter, and I do not belong to a newsroom. I am (probably) incapable of exfiltrating bulletproof evidence of industrial espionage from either the Pentagon or the People’s Liberation Army. But I can write emails to, and ask questions of, most of the people who were involved in the story’s publication and all of the companies who appeared in it. And I’m curious what they might say, or not say, five years after the fact.

I wonder, specifically, about the story’s legacy within Bloomberg. What kind of oral culture developed around “The Big Hack,” before and after its publication? How many Bloomberg journalists believe it’s still true? Mark Gurman, the best Apple reporter in the business, joined Bloomberg in 2016. Brad Stone, who authored the definitive book about former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, has worked there since 2015. What do they think about all of this?

Finally, I’m interested in speculation from other journalists about what happened with this story. Speculation has a poor reputation, in both journalism and real estate, but I think the practice is warranted in this case. No other method has established a consensus around the accuracy of “The Big Hack,” so I think it’s worth trying out new techniques.

So: I have some emails to send. In the meantime, if you know anything about “The Big Hack,” or just have a theory about it, you can email me at info@interestingmysteries.com.

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