Magazine publishes 2011 interview with porn star who said had affair with Trump
THE ADULT-film star who has alleged that she had an affair with Donald Trump described her relationship with him in detail in a 2011 interview that was published on Friday for the first time.
In Touch Weekly, a celebrity magazine, published the interview with Stephanie Clifford, who went by the name Stormy Daniels when she appeared in dozens of adult films.
In a 5,500-word transcript of the interview — conducted several years before the star of “The Apprentice” reality show ventured into presidential politics — Daniels said she met Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in 2006 and they began their affair the day they met. It continued with encounters in several cities for the next 11 months, she said.
She said Trump repeatedly suggested he could get her on his NBC programme as a contestant but never came through. He nicknamed her “Honeybunch,” she said, and told her she was “smart and beautiful just like his daughter.”
At one point in their first meeting at his hotel suite, she said, she asked him about his wife, Melania, who had recently given birth to their son, Barron. “He goes, ‘Oh, don’t worry about her’ (and) quickly, quickly changed the subject,” she told the magazine.
Daniels gave the magazine the interview several years before she allegedly signed a non-disclosure agreement brokered by Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that she received US$130,000 during the presidential campaign in 2016 in exchange for her silence about her relationship with Trump. Daniels had begun discussions with several news organisations at that time, but the payment appears to have silenced her.
The White House and Cohen have denied any sexual encounter between Trump and Daniels, and Cohen last week released a statement that he said came from Daniels denying it as well. Daniels has not publicly commented since the 2011 interview, conducted by reporter Jordi Lippe-McGraw, who worked at the time for Bauer Publishing, In Touch’s parent company.
Daniels’ account squares with some of what is now widely known about the president, though less so in 2011. Among other things, she said she never saw Trump drink alcohol in any of her encounters with him; the president has said repeatedly that he has never had an alcoholic beverage. She also said that her encounters with him were set up through a bodyguard named “Keith”; Trump’s longtime security chief was Keith Schiller.
Among the more bizarre details, Daniels said Trump watched the Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week” documentaries during one of their trysts. She also said he complimented her on her nose, likening it to “a beet.” She said he did not wear a condom during their trysts.
Asked by the magazine why she came forward five years after the alleged affair ended, Daniels said she was upset about comments that Trump had made criticising people in the pornography business. “It was very derogatory, and that makes me more mad than anything,” she said.
The magazine’s editor, James Heidenry, said in an interview this week that a transcript of the Daniels interview, conducted in May 2011, had been in In Touch’s archives for years, though he was not sure why it had never been published. (A few months after the interview, Daniels’ attorneys sent a cease-and-desist letter to another website, the Dirty, that had made reference to a Daniels and Trump connection.)
The recorded interview and transcript of it were all but forgotten by In Touch’s staff until the Wall Street Journal’s article was published last week, Heidenry said. When he learned from a staff member about the interview’s existence, “I knew it would make a great story for us,” he said.
Daniels passed a polygraph test witnessed by an In Touch employee, Heidenry said, as did her then-husband, Mike Moz, who corroborated her story. Daniels signed a contract for the interview but was not compensated for it, a spokeswoman for the magazine said.