Daniels testifies of sex with Trump as he listens
Gives explicit details about alleged encounter
NEw York — when Donald trump met Stormy Daniels, their fling seemed fleeting: he was a 60-year-old married mogul at the peak of reality television fame, and she was 27, not half his age, a louisiana native raised in poverty and headed to pornographic stardom.
But that chance encounter in lake tahoe, Nev., some two decades ago set off a chain of events that has brought the nation the first criminal trial of an american president.
on tuesday, Daniels took the stand at that trial, bringing the former president face to face with the porn actress at the center of his case.
the charges stem from her story of a sexual encounter with trump during a 2006 celebrity golf tournament in lake tahoe, a story she was shopping around a decade later, in the closing days of the presidential campaign. trump’s longtime lawyer, michael cohen, paid her $130,000 as part of a nondisclorure agreement before Election Day, and the former president is now accused of falsifying business records to cover up his reimbursements of cohen.
Daniels’s fast-paced testimony lasted hours, during which she described a sexual encounter that trump has long denied. She unspooled salacious details, so much so that the judge balked at some of the testimony, implying it was gratuitously vulgar, and the defense sought a mistrial.
the incident occurred, Daniels said, after the future president invited her to dinner inside his palatial lake tahoe hotel suite. he answered the door wearing silk pajamas. when he was rude, she playfully spanked him with a rolled-up magazine. and when she asked about his wife, he told her not to worry, that they didn’t even sleep in the same room — testimony that prompted trump to shake his head in disgust and mutter an expletive to his lawyers.
Daniels then recounted the sex itself in explicit detail. it happened, she said, after she returned from the bathroom where she had freshened her lipstick and found trump in his boxer shorts and t-shirt. She tried to leave and he blocked her path, though not, she said, in a threatening manner. the sex was brief, she said, and although she never said no, she said there was a notable “power imbalance.”
“i was staring up at the ceiling, wondering how i got there,” she told the jury, adding that trump did not wear a condom.
the testimony was an astonishing moment in american political history: a porn actress, across from a former and potentially future president, telling the world what she was once paid to keep quiet about.
Daniels, 45, has told her story widely — to prosecutors, reporters, her friends, and more — but never to jurors, and not with trump in the room. her appearance on the stand, which appeared to unnerve trump and inflame the media frenzy enveloping the trial, aired his dirty laundry, under oath, in mortifying detail.
in this context, Daniels’s story is not just a sordid kiss-andtell tale; it spotlights what prosecutors allege was trump’s criminality. he is accused of engineering the false business records scheme to cover up all traces of the alleged tryst: the payment, the reimbursement to cohen, and the sex.
while the defense cast the testimony as a superfluous smear campaign, Daniels provided prosecutors with some useful details, establishing fundamental details. and she testified that she would have told the same story in 2016, had she not signed the nondisclosure agreement and taken the money from cohen.
But her testimony, at times, seemed problematic for prosecutors. Daniels testified that she had not been motivated by money, which could draw skepticism from jurors, who know that she took the $130,000.
“my motivation wasn’t money,” she said. “it was motivated out of fear, not money.”
the jury also saw the judge, Juan merchan, scold Daniels at least twice, instructing her to stick to the questions asked of her. at one point, he even issued his own objection, interrupting her testimony as she began to describe the sexual position she and trump were in.
merchan, generally a stoic presence with a tight grip over his courtroom, showed rare exasperation as the testimony veered in a scurrilous direction and the trial took on a circuslike atmosphere.
he also asked Daniels to slow down. She was a rapid-fire talker, prone to interspersing her testimony with laughter and lengthy asides.
outside the jury’s presence, the judge acknowledged that “there were some things better left unsaid” and suggested that Daniels might have credibility issues.
Yet he rejected the defense’s bid for a mistrial, instead inviting trump’s lawyers to mount an aggressive questioning of Daniels.
“the more times this story has changed, the more fodder for cross-examination,” he said.
On the stand
Stormy Daniels has told her story widely but never to jurors, until now.