Trump faces backlash over ‘hush money’ to porn star

DONALD Trump faced fresh legal and political headaches last night after a porn star went on TV to make lurid claims about an affair with him.

Potentially most damaging to the US president are questions over whether an attempt to silence Stormy Daniels with $130,000 in hush money may have breached campaign finance laws.

The 39-year-old’s salacious account of her relationship with Mr Trump after they met at a 2006 golf tournament posed uncomfortable questions for the President and his wife Melania, to whom he was married at the time.

Mr Trump has denied Ms Daniels’s claims but her lawyer Michael Avenatti said yesterday she was ‘prepared to discuss intimate details’ about the president.

Ms Daniels alleged in her Sunday night interview with the CBS programme 60 Minutes that a man had approached her in a car park in 2011 and threatened her unless she stopped talking about the future US president.

Legal commentators said yesterday that if Mr Trump was found to have been involved in such intimidation, it could be grounds to impeach him.

The president also faces political fallout, with evidence that evangelical Christian women – a key source of electoral backing – are cooling in their support for him over the flurry of tawdry accusations about his private life.

The White House reiterated yesterday that Mr Trump, 71, continues to deny having had an affair with Ms Daniels, saying she had no evidence to corroborate her claims.

‘The president strongly, clearly and consistently has denied these underlying claims,’ a spokesman said.

Referring to the fact that Ms Daniels had previously denied the affair, he added: ‘The only one who has been inconsistent is the one making the claims.’

Asked why the president would pay off anyone making false charges against him, the White House spokesman said: ‘False charges are settled out of court all the time.’

He added it would be ‘up to the president’ whether he responded personally to Ms Daniels’s claims, which her lawyer yesterday challenged him to do.

Mr Trump has uncharacteristically refused to comment publicly on Ms Daniels’s claims, or those of former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who says she had a tenmonth affair with him over the same period.

He maintained his silence on the claims yesterday, but tweeted: ‘So much fake news. Never been more voluminous or more inaccurate.’

The fact that the TV interview was aired despite a confidentiality agreement Ms Daniels signed 11 days before the 2016 general election has prompted predictions that other women with similar gagging deals may now choose to ignore them.

Michael Cohen, a lawyer for the president, insists he paid Ms Daniels to stop talking about Mr Trump out of his own pocket.

She has filed a lawsuit saying the deal is invalid because the President never signed it.

Trevor Potter, a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, told the 60 Minutes programme the payment could represent an illegal unreported campaign contribution.

‘The payment of the money just creates an enormous legal mess for Trump, for Cohen and anyone else who was involved in this in the campaign,’ he said.

If Mr Cohen made the payment on behalf of Mr Trump – an election candidate – it amounted to ‘a co-ordinated, illegal, in-kind contribution by Cohen for the purpose of influencing the election, of benefiting the candidate by keeping this secret’, said Mr Potter.

He added that whether or not Mr Trump repaid his lawyer the $130,000 hush money, it could still amount to an illegal campaign contribution.

Mr Avenatti claimed yesterday Ms Daniels had a ‘whole host of evidence’ about the alleged affair and her claims Mr Trump knew of the deal to buy her silence.

‘This is not going away,’ said Mr Avenatti. ‘Mr Cohen and the president better come clean with the American people and they better do it quickly.’

He added they would prove that Mr Cohen’s claim that he paid Ms Daniels off his own bat is ‘false’ and that ‘at all times, Mr Trump knew about the $130,000… and with the assistance of Mr Cohen sought to intimidate and put my client under his thumb’.

On 60 Minutes, Mr Avenatti described the Trump camp’s treatment of his client as ‘thuggish behaviour from people in power’.

Mr Cohen has demanded a public apology for ‘defamatory’ claims by the porn star that he may have been behind an intimidation campaign that included physical threats to her.

Mr Cohen’s lawyer, Brent Blakely, warned Mr Avenatti that his client should stop making false and defamatory comments, ‘namely that he [Cohen] was responsible for an alleged thug who supposedly visited’ and threatened the porn star. But Ms Daniels hit back last night, announcing that she is suing Mr Cohen. She claims he defamed her by suggesting she lied about her affair with Mr Trump.

Mrs Trump’s office has refused to answer questions and she remained in Florida when her husband returned to Washington shortly before the interview was aired.

‘Thuggish behaviour’

THEY never learn, do they? No matter how often they’ve watched the drama play out to its unavoidable end, no matter how many casualties they’ve seen fall, politicians and public figures with a grubby secret never seem to grasp this simple lesson: it is never the secret that brings you down. It is always the cover-up.

Stormy Daniels didn’t look much like a flaky porn star on the make in that seismic 60 Minutes interview she gave at the weekend.

She looked more like a Stephanie Clifford – her real name – who might just as easily have been a businesswoman talking about her new venture, a concerned parent discussing gun control, a Green Party candidate outlining her policies. She’s an attractive, but not conspicuously glamorous, 39-year-old woman who looks her age.

Aside from perhaps a touch of Botox in her forehead, which is as commonplace as blonde highlights in well-heeled women of her vintage, there’s no sign of the excessive cosmetic work that usually identifies porn stars even when they’re in mufti: no puffed-out lips, no plumped-up cheeks, no inch-long lash extensions.

Glamorous

Her make-up was understated to the point of an afterthought, and it didn’t hide the bags under her eyes. She was dressed as if for a smart-casual business meeting in a neat red blouse and a kneelength pencil skirt. She was well-spoken, measured and calm, and kept steady eye contact with her interviewer. She resisted invitations to gild her story or to make it more sensational, and avoided conjecture. She was clearly, unmistakably telling the truth.

But then, it’s a mark of how low American political standards have fallen, in the year since Donald Trump’s election, that nobody doubted her claims for a moment even before she opened her mouth. Astonishingly, the story of the president of the United States having had a sordid fling, and unprotected sex, with a porn star shortly after the birth of his youngest child has entirely lost the power to astonish us at all. If there’s anything slightly surprising in Stormy Daniels’s tale, in fact, it’s that any sane woman would have unprotected sex with a sleazebag as raddled as Donald Trump. Just two years ago, a similar story about the then-president Barack Obama would have shaken the globe on its axis, but that shockable world now feels like it belongs in a parallel universe. Stormy’s story is utterly credible, not alone because she’s patently a reliable witness, but because it is entirely in keeping with everything we know about Donald Trump. If anything, in fact, it’s milder than the exploits he has boasted of himself.

After all, when you’ve heard a presidential candidate brag about grabbing women by the genitalia without their consent, an account of his entirely consensual one-night stand with a porn star is humdrum fare indeed. So if only Trump and his bully-boy aides had had the good sense to learn from history, and to realise that the cover-up is always more toxic than the lie, Stormy Daniels would have been wasting her breath.

But when the story involves a sinister warning to the porn star, and when it turns out she got a $130,000 pay-off to silence her, and when she’s now being threatened with a $20million lawsuit and a life of ‘hell’, that might just make Martha listen up. It’s certainly caught the attention of Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia. He’s flung his net so wide, by now, that suggestions of improper or underhand financial transactions, whomever they involve, could well form part of the probe.

Encounter

Stormy Daniels, then the star of movies such as Dripping Wet Sex 4, claims she met Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe in July 2006. He pursued and flattered her, telling her she reminded him of his daughter Ivanka, which was just so weird on so many levels that it rings disturbingly true.

He was 60 and she was 27, and while she told CBS that she didn’t want to sleep with him and didn’t find him attractive, she said: ‘I’m not a victim; it was consensual.’ He tried to get her into bed again, dangling the lure of a slot on Celebrity Apprentice, and it seems she may have kept emails and texts that back up her story. But the affair went no further and, in 2011, she tried to sell the story of their encounter to a magazine for $15,000.

Two things happened to stop her: Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen threatened the publishers with a libel action, and a strange man accosted Stormy and her infant daughter in a Las Vegas car park. ‘Leave Trump alone, forget the story,’ he told her. Then, leaning into her car and looking at her baby, he is alleged to have said: ‘That’s a beautiful little girl. It’d be a shame if something happened to her mom.’ She’d never seen him before but, she told CBS, she’d definitely know him if she saw him again.

Then, 11 days before the presidential election in 2016, Stormy was paid $130,000 in hush money by Cohen. He claims he paid it from his own private account and that it didn’t come out of campaign funds. But because Donald Trump never actually signed it, Stormy’s lawyers are now challenging the deal. And Trump’s team are demanding $20million in damages for her breach of contract – another example, she insists, of their bullying tactics.

If Trump had ignored Stormy’s 2011 exposé in In Touch, a low-rent gossip mag, it would have been old news by 2016. If he hadn’t paid her off in 2016, the Wall Street Journal would never have gotten wind of the deal.

At the time, Stormy denied the story, but when proof of the payment emerged, Cohen made the fatal mistake of claiming she’d been threatening to derail Trump’s campaign with a pack of lies. That got Stormy’s back up, especially in light of the warning in 2011, and she realised that these people were willing to destroy her – perhaps literally – to protect Trump.

Threat

The safest sanctuary for herself and her little girl, she clearly reckoned, was front and centre of the story. Now that it’s out in the open, Trump’s people have no incentive to threaten her further, and no hiding place if she should come to any harm.

Stormy isn’t the only woman to kiss and tell about a fling with Trump. In another TV interview recently, ex-Playboy model Karen McDougal told of a ten-month affair that began just after young Barron Trump was born in 2006. But there are many more who claim their experiences with Trump were not consensual. At least a dozen have accused him of a range of sexual assaults. Given that some 64million Americans still went ahead and voted for him having heard the ‘grab ’em by the p **** ’ tape, it’s unlikely that these women’s testimonies were ever going to do Trump much harm. So it’s deeply ironic that the woman who might just bring him down is one who had a casual, consensual, unremarkable fling, 12 years ago, with a man who was known to boast about his sexual conquests and prowess.

Now that Stormy’s case is going ahead, there’s a real possibility Trump will have to testify on oath. And if there’s a whiff of perjury, he’ll be impeached. In other words, it’s not the philandering, the adultery or the sexual misconduct that now threaten to bring about his downfall – it’s the web of lies he spun to cover them up. But then, when it comes to politicians and their grubby secrets, it has ever been thus. And as for their inability to learn from history, that never changes either.