Stormy Daniels: Yes, I made money from Trump ‘affair’
Porn star Stormy Daniels acknowledged that she made money from her story of an alleged affair with Donald Trump, saying it was exactly what the former president himself would do in her shoes.
In lively exchanges on her second day of testimony, Daniels, 45, was accused of spending years profiting from the story with a book deal, a reality television show and a line of merchandise she touted when he was arrested for the first time on criminal charges.
The court was shown an image in which Daniels appeared with a halo on the side of what was called the “Stormy, Saint of Indictments, Candle”.
On social media she had boasted that “orders are pouring in”, Susan Necheles, Trump’s lawyer, said.
“I was doing my job,” Daniels said. “Selling your merchandise? Necheles asked. “Pushing things?”
“Not unlike Mr Trump,” she replied. Trump, 77, is accused of falsifying business records to conceal a hush-money payment to Daniels to stop her speaking publicly about an alleged affair with him on the eve of the 2016 presidential election.
Trump denies both the charges and the claim that he had sex with Daniels.
Daniels, who first testified at the Manhattan criminal court on Tuesday (US time), was cast by prosecutors as a key witness whose account would demonstrate to the jury the details of the story that Trump and his aides were trying to cover up in the final days of his first run for the White House.
She said she met Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in 2006 and was invited to have dinner with him at his hotel, where he received her in pyjamas until she instructed him to change.
Excusing herself to go to the lavatory, she said she emerged to find him stripped to his shirt and boxer shorts, posing on the bed. “That’s when I had that moment where I felt the room spin, in slow motion,” she told the court on Tuesday. Necheles ridiculed the idea that a porn star would be shocked to find a man in a T-shirt and boxer shorts lying on a bed, after making hundreds of films in which men appeared in far greater states of undress.
In those cases she was expecting it, Daniels replied. If she saw Trump now “on the bed, I would probably have the same reaction. An older man in his underwear, that I was not expecting”.
Trump’s lawyer also challenged the idea that she was intimidated. Daniels had said she was never threatened by Trump, but there was a “power imbalance”.
But Daniels had been “bossing President Trump around, telling him to change out of his pyjamas and asking him to stop talking about himself”, Necheles said. “You are a pretty assertive woman, right?” “More so now,” Daniels replied. “This was the first time in your life that someone had made a pass at you, was it?” “No,” said Daniels.
“But it is the first time they have a bodyguard outside the door, and they were in their underwear, and they were twice as old as me.”
Necheles sought to suggest that Daniels had changed details of her story. Had she not suggested, in one interview in 2011, that she and Trump had dinner, whereas now she complained that they did not eat?
“I’ve maintained that in every interview, that we never actually ate,” she replied. “Having dinner, at least from where I’m from, doesn’t necessarily mean you have to put food in your mouth. You’re going to someone’s house for dinner, it’s dinnertime.”
She lent back in her chair, turned at an angle to Trump’s lawyer, facing the jury and away from Trump. She was mostly out of his line of sight too, screened by the judge’s bench.
Necheles said Daniels “had appeared in more than 200 sex films” and had written and directed about 160.
“You have a lot of experience in making phony stories about sex appear to be real,” she said. Daniels replied: “The sex in the films is very much real, just like what had happened to me in that room. The character themes may be different, but the sex is very real. That’s why it’s pornography and not a B-movie.”
“You are writing these stories about sex, right?” Necheles said. “You have a lot of experience.”
“I have experience in writing dialogue,” Daniels replied. “Not in how to have sex. I’m pretty sure we all know how to do that.”
Necheles said Daniels had begun raising her allegations in public in 2018 in spite of the alleged non-disclosure agreement with Cohen, Trump’s lawyer.
“You then decided you wanted to publicly say that you had sex with President Trump?” Necheles said.
“No,” Daniels replied. “No-one would ever want to publicly say that. I wanted to defend myself against people publicly attacking me after Michael Cohen told the story.”
Necheles said Daniels had signed a US$800,000 book deal and a US$200,000 agreement to appear in a reality television show. She had embarked on a tour of strip clubs called “Make America Horny Again”, the lawyer said.
“I never used that title,” Daniels said. “I hated it.”
Susan Hoffinger, for the prosecution, asked Daniels about threats she had received after she had begun telling her story. “I have had to hire security,” she said. “I have had to move a couple of times.”
Had coming forward been “a net positive or net negative?” Hoffinger asked. “Negative,” Daniels replied.
After nearly three hours on the witness stand, she stepped down, striding past the defence table without glancing at Trump to leave via a side door.
During the lunch break,Trump renewed his attacks on Judge Juan Merchan, defying a gag order that the court has imposed on him. “I am the only Presidential Candidate in History to be GAGGED,” he wrote online.
The trial continues. – The Times