Stormy Daniels fends off accusations she made up story of sex tryst with Trump
NEW YORK — Stormy Daniels faced tough questions from Donald Trump’s defense team as she returned to the witness stand following her bombshell testimony on the alleged Lake Tahoe tryst with the former president as his hush money trial resumed Thursday in Manhattan.
Keying in on a central part of the adult film star’s testimony about her encounter with Trump, defense lawyer Susan Necheles skeptically asked Daniels about having appeared in porn movies with “naked women and naked men” yet being startled by Trump on a bed in a T-shirt and boxers.
Daniels said that coming out of the bathroom to find a man twice her age “in his underwear, you’re not expecting to be there” was different.
“This was not the first time in your life someone had made a pass at you?” Necheles asked at one point.
“It is the first time they had a bodyguard standing outside the door … and were in their underwear and were twice my age,” Daniels shot back.
She later said her “own insecurities” kept her from refusing.
Necheles repeatedly cast doubt on Daniels’ account, at one point asking her whether she was experienced in fabricating “phony sex stories” as a porn star, to which Daniels replied that the sex was “very real.”
“If this story (about Trump) wasn’t true, I would have written it to be a lot better,” Daniels snapped back a few moments later, to some apparent amusement from jurors.
As Daniels described how Trump sat on his hotel room couch the night of their tryst, he furrowed his brow, looking mad and a little disgusted. When there was a mention of Daniels’ former attorney Michael Avanatti mulling a run for president, Trump smirked.
Daniels also testified that she did not have personal knowledge about Trump’s role in the hush money payment to her and that she negotiated the payment through her lawyer.
Cross ended with Necheles asserting Daniels “never had an affair with President Trump” and a sustained objection.
Going for the money
Necheles came in hot as her cross examination got underway Thursday, accusing Daniels of threatening Trump in the leadup to the 2016 election.
Daniels said that was “false.”
The defense attorney played audio of Trump’s then-fixer talking with Daniels’ lawyer, Keith Davidson, in which he described Daniels as anxious to close the deal, quoting her to the fixer, “She wants this money more than you can ever imagine.”
Daniels pushed back on the idea that she was money hungry, saying that if the story were to be made public there’d be a “target on my back and my family’s.”
“I never asked for money from anyone in particular; I asked to tell my story,” she said. “… I was asking to sell my story to publications to get the truth out.”
Trump, 77, has pleaded not guilty to felony charges alleging he covered up a $130,000 reimbursement to Cohen for handling the hush money payoff to Daniels, logging it in the Trump Organization’s financial books as payment for legal fees.
Speaking confidently, tilted slightly toward the jury and away from Trump, Daniels said of the payment for her silence was “a perfect solution.” During direct examination, she had testified that she didn’t want to deal with the fallout of the story, which she kept secret even to those closest to her for years.
Trump appeared in court looking furious. As he took his seat, he jabbed his finger at Necheles, as he spoke aggressively to the lawyer.
“Here we sit, after two and a half weeks and I think you’ll see some very revealing things today,” he told reporters in the hallway outside the courtroom before entering.
The Tahoe tryst
In a brutal day for the presumptive Republican nominee in this year’s election, Daniels on Tuesday divulged details of their infamous alleged tryst in a Lake Tahoe hotel room in 2006 and efforts to silence her years later.
In an at-times explicit account, Daniels described a consensual but uncomfortable sexual encounter with Trump when she was 27 after his bodyguard summoned her to his hotel room for a meal they never ate. She detailed coming out of a restroom to find Trump, then 60, sprawled out on the bed in boxers and a T-shirt and blacking out during brief sex.
The judge permitted prosecutors to elicit the graphic testimony after Trump’s lawyers called Daniels’ credibility into question in their opening statements — accusing her of extortion— in line with the strategy they’ve taken during the trial attacking the state’s witnesses.
Daniels, 45, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, told jurors she agreed to stay silent about the incident more than a decade after it occurred after Cohen, negotiated the $130,000 non-disclosure deal with her lawyer 11 days out from Trump’s stunning victory against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.
Daniels said she worried for her safety after Trump announced his candidacy, having been threatened in a Las Vegas parking lot years prior around the time she first sought to share her story with the media.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office alleges the payment to Cohen — which came in the form of checks Trump signed from his desk in the Oval Office — capped a yearslong conspiracy to promote his candidacy by unlawful means.
Prosecutors say the scheme was born at an August 2015 meeting at Trump Tower attended by Trump, his fixer, and former tabloid publisher David Pecker, who told jurors he agreed to be the campaign’s “eyes and ears” by identifying and burying negative stories about Trump and elevating hit jobs about his opponents.
In testimony last week, jurors heard from Keith Davidson, the lawyer who repped Daniels in hush money negotiations, and former Playboy model Karen Mcdougal.
Davidson described dealing with a frantic Cohen in the waning days of the 2016 White House race, who urgently sought to contain the porn star’s allegations following the bombshell release of the “Access Hollywood” tape so soon before the election.
Trump denies all allegations and that he ever slept with Daniels. His lawyers have claimed an “obsessed” Cohen went rogue in paying her off that Trump believed he was paying his lawyer for legitimate legal services.