Porn actress threatened and ‘told to leave Trump alone’
LOS ANGELES: 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 yesterday in the United States on 60 Minutes.
A few weeks after Trump’s attorney, Michael Cohen, learned 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, heading for a workout class, was getting her infant daughter out of a car seat.
‘‘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,’’ Daniels said.
‘‘That’s a beautiful little girl,’’ she recalled the man telling her. ‘‘It’d be a shame if something happened to her mom.’’
‘‘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 proper name is Stephanie Clifford, said she never saw the man again, but would easily recognise him. 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 $US130,000 ($NZ178,444) just before the November 2016 presidential election in return for her silence.
Asked why she decided to speak 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 (39) told CBS that she at that time had 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.
The confidentiality pact requires Daniels to pay the president $1 million each time she violates its terms, as she apparently did again on 60 Minutes. Lawyers for Trump had already accused Daniels of breaching the agreement at least 20 times, saying she was liable for as much as $20 million in damages.
Daniels also said she was pressured to sign statements released by Cohen in which she denied having an affair with Trump.
‘‘I felt intimidated and honestly bullied, and I didn’t know what to do, and so I signed it, even though I had repeatedly expressed that I wouldn’t break the agreement.
‘‘But I was not comfortable lying,’’ she said.
Cohen did not respond to an email seeking comment.
Daniels offered some explicit details of her alleged tryst with Trump.
At the time, Daniels was 27 and Trump was 60.
She remembered Trump telling her, ‘‘You are special. You remind me of my daughter.’’
She said they had sex just once — the time they met. She felt no attraction to him, but consented to sex anyway, she said.
During subsequent encounters, Daniels said, she was focused mainly on his promise to get her on the television show The Apprentice, which never materialised.
‘‘I thought of it as a business deal,’’ she said.
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.
Trump ignored reporters’ questions about Daniels yesterday as he walked into the White House after a weekend getaway at his estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
Daniels’ attorney, Michael Avenatti, mocked Cohen for suggesting that the $US130,000 payment to Daniels, made through a shell company that Trump’s lawyer created in the closing days of the 2016 campaign, had nothing to do with the election. He called the threat of $US20 million in damages ‘‘a thuggish tactic’’.
‘‘It’s no different than what happened in the parking lot in Las Vegas,’’ Avenatti said. — Los Angeles Times
❛ You are special. You remind me of my
daughter
—
Donald Trump
❛ That’s a beautiful little girl . . . It’d be a shame if
something happened to her mom.’