All the President’s accusers
Porn star, playmate and Apprentice contestant create problems for Potus.
Aporn star, a playmate and a contestant who washed out on Donald Trump’s reality TV show have become exemplars for doing battle with a President for whom practically nothing is out of bounds. They are showing the most effective way to deal with him is on his own terms.
Stormy Daniels, Karen McDougal and Summer Zervos are suing for the right to tell their stories about him. The headaches and unforeseeable turns these legal fights present would be well understood by a man who, according to a USA Today tally, has filed at least 3500 lawsuits of his own, for grievances real and imagined.
Adult entertainer Daniels has outmanoeuvred the President and his inept lawyer Michael Cohen at nearly every turn. They apparently believed they had bought her silence about the year-long extramarital affair she claims to have had with the future president a decade ago.
When Daniels signed a nondisclosure agreement in the weeks before the 2016 election, hardly anyone thought Trump had much chance of winning, especially after the furore over comments he had made about women on the nowfamous Access Hollywood tape. So US$130,000 to stay quiet must have looked too good for Daniels to pass up.
Now that her alleged paramour in the Oval Office, however, there is surely much more to be gained from her account, so she is trying to slip free from the agreement on the technicality that Trump never signed it.
Backing out of a deal if there’s a better one to be had? Trump did it for decades. “I’ve made a fortune by using debt, and if things don’t work out I renegotiate the debt. I mean, that’s a smart thing, not a stupid thing,” he boasted to CBS during his presidential campaign. As President, he has reversed himself so many times that his befuddled allies on Capitol Hill are never sure where or if he will land on most issues.
Now it is Trump who is remaining silent — conspicuously so. No tweets, no vicious nicknames, no threats. She, meanwhile, is going on 60 Minutes, where viewership is likely to be some of its highest.
Daniels has become a ninja master in Trump’s own medium, smiting trolls on Twitter with a verve. When one man tweeted that she was a “scank,” she responded by correcting his spelling.
McDougal, Playboy’s 1998 Playmate of the Year, claims to have had an affair with Trump around the same time as Daniels. But the arrangement she is trying to escape is the one she made with the National Enquirer’s parent company, whose chief executive, David Pecker, is close to Trump. In her lawsuit, McDougal claims American Media was working secretly with Cohen to keep her quiet; the company says it contacted Trump’s lawyer only to vet her story. A takedown by a former playmate would be a sour end note indeed, given how assiduously Trump styled himself as Playboy’s ideal of libidinous masculinity. Zervos, a former contestant from The Apprentice, is one of more than a dozen women who have accused the president of unwanted sexual advances, in her case that he kissed her and groped her breasts when she met him to discuss a job. During his presidential campaign, Trump called the women all liars and threatened to sue. But Trump never did: empty threats being another of his favourite tactics. Zervos went to court, charging defamation.
On Tuesday, the same day McDougal filed her lawsuit, a New York judge ruled that Zervos’ case can go forward. The precedent cited was the one in the sexual harassment lawsuit that ultimately led to the impeachment of Bill Clinton. The Zervos lawsuit opens the possibility that Trump’s other accusers will return to tell their stories under oath — and that the President himself will have to as well. When Zervos was on The Apprentice, Trump fired her because she interrupted him. She may get in a last word after all.