Stormy Daniels is an imperfect witness. I still believe her.
I believe Stormy Daniels. As she testified tuesday in the new York criminal trial of former president Donald trump, her credibility in my eyes grew and solidified just like the knot that formed in my stomach as she described their 2006 sexual encounter.
my visceral discomfort from Daniels’s testimony is a familiar feeling for many women, often spurred when hearing another woman describe being in a situation she didn’t want to be in — particularly one of a sexual nature.
Daniels, who took the stand in the case in which trump is charged with falsifying business records in a scheme to hide payments made to her in the final weeks of the 2016 presidential election, did not accuse trump of abuse. She said she wasn’t forced or even coerced into sex. instead, she spoke of her own bad choices and fear of judgment.
“i felt ashamed that i didn’t stop it, and that i didn’t say no,” Daniels testified, according to real-time reporting from nBc.
for weeks, media headlines and legal pundits fueled anticipation for the kind of dishy and salacious testimony that the former adult film star was expected to give in open court. if the trial had a marquee, her name would be in bright, blinking lights right next to coheadliner trump.
instead, Daniels testified to an experience that was, to put it plainly, awful.
And she did it in front of a hostile crowd. She was sitting just feet from trump, who has, for years, repeatedly attacked and disparaged her in speeches and social media posts. Just before her testimony, Justice Juan merchan said she had credibility issues, echoing the sentiment expressed by defense counsel.
it’s probably safe to say that many Americans agree. She is at the center of the so-called hush-money trial, the details of which are portrayed like the plot of a straight-to-streaming movie: the president and the porn star.
She is unapologetic, not only about her acceptance of payments — which allegedly came from trump — in exchange for staying quiet about their liaison but also about her career. She even testified that she prefers to be called by her adult film stage name rather than her legal one, Stephanie clifford. And when attacked publicly by trump and others, she’s showed a willingness to throw verbal counterpunches. She’s no one’s victim.
But all of those qualities also make her inherently unbelievable to many. that phenomenon is nothing new. Scores of women know what it’s like to not be believed on the witness stand. Research shows that it commonly happens even to women who have never made a living in porn or been paid off by a billionaire with presidential aspirations.
“to be legible as a victim by prosecutors, by judges, by juries, by the public at-large, you have to hew to a pretty narrow path where you are not just white and straight and cisgender, but also meek and weak and passive,” leigh goodmark, a professor at the University of maryland carey School of law and author of the book “imperfect Victims,” told me.
And it made me wonder if the jurors can all put those inherent biases aside in assessing Daniels’s credibility. i also wonder if they — especially the women who are empaneled — got the same sickening bellyache i did when Daniels described what happened when she met trump in a lake tahoe hotel room for dinner after a celebrity golf tournament.
She said when she returned from a visit to the restroom, she found that trump had disrobed down to “his boxer shorts and a t-shirt.”
“the room spun in slow motion,” she testified. Such swooning is a familiar descriptor to the ears of anyone who has experienced trauma.
“i thought, ‘great, i’ve put myself in this bad situation,’ ” Daniels testified, adding that she was neither verbally nor physically threatened but that there was an “imbalance of power, for sure.”
“i thought you were serious about what you wanted,” trump said, according to Daniels, referring to their earlier conversation about her potentially becoming a contestant on trump’s reality show “the Apprentice.”
Despite remembering details about the room, the meal, and their conversation, Daniels said she did not remember how she became undressed.
“i just, i think i blacked out,” she testified. Another tell of trauma.
During the encounter, she said she stared at the ceiling, “trying to think of anything other than what was happening there.”
When it was over, she testified, he said it was “great.” She said she just wanted to leave.
After Daniels was questioned by prosecutors, trump’s attorneys asked for a mistrial, arguing that Daniels’s account would only serve to “inflame” the jury. merchan denied the request but added: “there were some things that probably would have been better left unsaid.”
Again, it is the credible account of a woman’s traumatic experience that was seen as the problem.
goodmark told me she teaches her law students to always approach a witness “from an empathetic place where you are open to someone having an experience that you haven’t had.”
neither the defense lawyers nor merchan showed that empathy. Hopefully the jurors will. i suspect the women already have.