Four takeaways from Stormy Daniels' ‘60 Minutes' interview with Anderson Cooper
PORN star Stormy Daniels appeared Sunday on “60 Minutes” to offer her account of an affair with President Donald Trump that she says began in 2006. Here are four big takeaways from her sitdown with Anderson Cooper. She is highly aware of the reasons people might doubt her story Daniels said she was not telling the truth when she denied the affair with Trump but is telling the truth now. Cooper read Daniels one of her multiple, prior denials and said, “That’s a lie?” “Yes,” Daniels replied flatly. Daniels said in 2011 that an Internet rumour about an affair with Trump was “bulls-- t.” She also denied the affair twice in written statements in January.
“I think there’s no question that it calls into question her credibility,” Daniels’ attorney, Michael Avenatti, said of the change to her story. “I also think that there’s no question that when the American people take all of the facts and evidence into consideration, that they are going to conclude that this woman is telling the truth.”
Daniels insisted that she is not motivated by money – she was not paid for the “60 Minutes” interview – but acknowledged that she previously considered selling her story for “large amounts of money.”
“Was I tempted?” she said. “Yes.”
Daniels also freely admitted to taking advantage of financial opportunities since the Wall Street Journal broke the story in January about the US$ 130,000 payment she received to stay quiet days before Election Day 2016.
“Yes, I’m getting more job offers now, but tell me one person who would turn down a job offer making more than they’ve been making, doing the same thing that they’ve always done,” she said.
Future polling will likely tell us whether Daniels and her lawyer are right about public opinion. In the meantime, they are openeyed about the doubts raised by profiting from an altered account. Daniels said she was physically threatened in 2011 A blog called the Dirty published what appears to have been the first report of an affair involving Daniels and Trump in October 2011. Bauer Publishing, which prints supermarket tabloids, also reported around the same time that Trump had cheated on his wife, Melania, with Daniels.
Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen denied the reports and threatened to sue Bauer, which had conducted an interview with Daniels months earlier but did not publish any of her comments until January 2018, when it posted a full transcript on the website of In Touch magazine.
Daniels told “60 Minutes” that she was threatened a short time after giving the interview to Bauer.
“I was in a parking lot,” Daniels said, “going to a fitness class with my infant daughter ... and a guy walked up on me and said to me, ‘ Leave Trump alone. Forget the story.’ And then he leaned around and looked at my daughter and said, ‘ That’s a beautiful little girl. It’d be a shame if something happened to her mom.’ And then he was gone.”
Daniels did not claim to know who the man was working for. Daniels won’t say whether she possesses text messages or photos that would back