Ken Kurson, the former editor of a New York newspaper that had been owned by his friend Jared Kushner, a top advisor to President Donald Trump, has been charged by federal prosecutors with stalking and harassing three people.
Kurson, a political consultant who is also a confidante of Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, is accused of repeatedly visiting his victims at work, making false complaints with their employer and “malicious cyber activity,” the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney’s office.
The Maplewood, New Jersey, resident surrendered to authorities on Friday morning, and is due to appear in federal court in Brooklyn later Friday afternoon.
Kurson’s arrest comes two years after he withdrew his name from consideration for a Trump administration appointment to the board of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The New York Times reported in 2018 that two doctors at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York had accused Kurson of harassment, and that the FBI had been notified about their claims as that agency conducted a background check of Kurson for the board seat.
Kurson, 52, claimed to Times in that same article that he had withdrawn his name because of the amount of paperwork required for the process.
The criminal complaint against Kurson says that he blamed one of the victims for splitting up his marriage.
The complaint also says FBI agents found evidence that Kurson, between September 2015 and December 2015, Kurson accessed the email and social media accounts of other victims without their knowledge, and installed keystroke logging spyware on one victim’s computer.
There was also evidence that Kurson contacted victims’ employers to make claims that include a “false allegation of improper contact with a minor,” according to the complaint.
He used the aliases “Jayden Wagner” and “Eddie Train” in making the false claims, the complaint said.
Prosecutors also said that “Kurson traveled on multiple occasions to the workplace of two of the victims, taking photographs and inquiring about one victim’s work schedule.”
An employer of two of the victims hired a security guard “as a result of Kurson’s conduct,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.
Kurson’s lawyer Marc Mukasey said, “Ken Kurson is an honorable man, a loving dad, and a brilliant writer. This case is hardly the stuff of a federal criminal prosecution.”
“He will get past it,” Mukasey said.
Kurson had helped run the former New York mayor Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign.
He later served as editor-in-chief of The New York Observer, when that then-weekly newspaper was owned by Kushner, who is also Trump’s son-in-law. The news outlet now is published online under the name Observer.
While the paper’s editor, Kurson advised then-presidential candidate Trump for a speech that he delivered to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in 2016. Kurson later sat in the Trump family box at the Republican National Convention that same year, The Times previously reported.
More recently, he founded a news website, Modern Consensus, which focuses on cryptocurrency and blockchain. Kurson serves on the board of the cryptocurrency company Ripple.
The Times reported in 2018 that the time that Kurson allegedly began harassing the Mount Sinai doctors, he and “and his wife were on the verge of getting a divorce.
One doctor, ” who had been a longtime friend of the couple’s, told hospital officials that she was concerned about what she saw as Mr. Kurson’s angry, erratic behavior,” The Times reported.
Kurson called the doctor a “very good friend” in a Times interview.
“I wish her nothing but the best.”