Trump accuser says was threatened
DANIELS IS SECOND WOMAN IN LESS THAN A WEEK TO TALK ON TV ABOUT TAKING PAY OFFS FROM US PRESIDENT
Stormy Daniels was threatened with physical harm in 2011 if she went public with her story of an alleged affair with Donald Trump, the porn actress said in an interview broadcast on Sunday on 60 Minutes.
A few weeks after Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen learnt that Daniels had shared her story with a magazine, a stranger approached her in a Las Vegas parking lot, she told Anderson Cooper on the CBS show.
Daniels, who was heading into a fitness class, was getting her infant daughter out of a car seat, along with a diaper bag.
“A guy walked up on me and said to me, ‘Leave Trump alone — forget the story’, and then he leant around and looked at my daughter,” Daniels said.
“That’s a beautiful little girl,” she recalled the man telling her. “It’d be a shame if something happened to her mum.”
“You took it as a direct threat?” Cooper asked.
“Absolutely,” she responded. “I was rattled. I remember going into the workout class, and my hands are shaking so much, I was afraid I was going to drop her.”
Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, said she never saw the man again, but would easily recognise him if she did. She said she was too scared to report the incident to the police.
The magazine, In Touch, did not publish Daniels’ story until January 2018, after the Wall Street Journal reported that Cohen had arranged to pay her $130,000 (Dh477,425) just before the November 2016 presidential election in return for her silence.
Asked why she decided to speak out to 60 Minutes, Daniels said it was “very important to me to be able to defend myself”.
“I’m not OK with being made out to be a liar, or people thinking that I did this for money,” she said, while acknowledging she was now getting more lucrative job offers.
Daniels is the second woman in less than a week to talk on national television about taking payoffs during the presidential campaign to stay quiet about their sexual affairs with Trump in the early years of his marriage to Melania Trump.
Affair with Playboy model
On Thursday, former Playboy model Karen McDougal told Cooper on CNN that she had a 10-month love affair with Trump in 2006 and 2007 — around the same time he was seeing Daniels. McDougal was paid $150,000 in hush money in August 2016, a couple weeks after Trump won the Republican presidential nomination.
The ethics group Common Cause has filed complaints saying both payments were illegal secret campaign donations meant to influence the election. Both women are now suing to break their confidentiality agreements, saying they were tricked into the deals.
President Trump’s representatives have denied that he had affairs with Daniels or McDougal.
Daniels, 39, told CBS that she accepted her confidentiality deal out of concern for her family’s safety.
“I did not want my family and my child exposed to all the things that she’s being exposed to right now, because everything that I was afraid of coming out has come out anyway, and guess what — I don’t have a million dollars,” she said.