NEW YORK — Ken Kurson, a close friend of former president Donald Trump’s son-in-law, has pleaded guilty in state court to misdemeanor charges of computer trespass and attempted eavesdropping, more than a year after he was pardoned by Trump for federal charges that he stalked a doctor, her colleague and the colleague’s spouse.
If he avoids arrest for a year and completes 100 hours of community service, his plea can be downgraded to harassment.
“The defendant is to lead a law-abiding life,” Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Josh Hanshaft said as he accepted the guilty plea.
Kurson, 53, an author and political consultant who served as editor of the New York Observer, was charged in August by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. He admitted to hacking his then-wife’s computer in 2015, monitoring her email and social media activity through a service called WebWatcher. Kurson also targeted a friend of his former spouse who worked with her at a summer camp, according to court documents.
Manhattan prosecutors took up the case after Trump issued a federal pardon to Kurson, one of several that the president gave to people with personal ties to him before he left office. The federal charges against Kurson also involved behavior from 2015, when he was going through a contentious divorce.
“We will not accept presidential pardons as get-out-of-jail-free cards for the well-connected in New York,” then-Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. (D) said last year in announcing Kurson’s case.
In November 2015, Kurson’s former spouse told police in South Orange, N.J., that he was “terrorizing her through email and social media causing her problems at work and in her social life,” according to an account in Kurson’s criminal court complaint.
It is unclear from court papers what, if any, overlap in alleged conduct exists between the state case and the dismissed federal prosecution. Kurson left the Lower Manhattan courthouse Wednesday with his attorney Marc Mukasey. Both declined to speak to reporters.
Kurson was a presence at the White House during Trump’s term in office. The administration tried to make him a board member of the National Endowment for the Humanities but he backed out when a background check revealed his past conduct, according to a New York Times report.
He co-wrote a book years ago with Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor, federal prosecutor and personal lawyer to Trump who has come under fire for his aggressive push of the former president’s false election fraud claims. Giuliani has also been under investigation by federal prosecutors in New York for a possible violation of a law that prohibits Americans to act as agents of other countries without disclosing it.
