In an extensive account of her meeting and sex with Donald Trump, former porn actress Stormy Daniels provided so much detail that, according to the defense, the trial should be annulled. Judge Juan Merchan did not elaborate, but also found that some details were ‘perhaps better left unsaid’. Trump was also reprimanded.
She is not a vital witness, in the sense that she cannot testify about what can be proven in this trial: that accounting fraud within the Trump Organization occurred with the aim of influencing the 2016 presidential elections.
But on the other hand, she could hardly have been left out, because without Stormy Daniels (45) and the hush money she was paid, there would have been no reason to book the payment of $ 130,000 as legal fees.
Although no TV cameras are allowed in the Manhattan courtroom, and we only know it through attendees and transcripts, she gave a cinematic performance. Daniels depicted Trump sitting on the bed before they had sex: posing, in boxer shorts and a T-shirt, with one knee/leg raised. She had to appoint Trump – also good for a later film adaptation – as her sex partner for one evening. As if someone somewhere was still hoping for mistaken identity.
He showed her that he was on the cover of a financial magazine. She accused him of posturing.
She introduced herself under her artist pseudonym, Stormy Daniels, and was allowed to explain – nervously, fast-talking – how she ended up in the porn industry and how, as a 27-year-old, she ended up in the bed of the then 60-year-old Trump, ‘older than my father’. Trump has always denied the sex.
The porn company Stormy Daniels worked for sponsored a golf tournament hole in Lake Tahoe in the summer of 2006. Donald Trump was one of the participants. They struck up a conversation and later a Trump aide invited her to dinner on his behalf. She hesitated but someone asked her what she had to lose. When she arrived in his room, he was dressed in silk pajamas. One time was not on the program. He changed clothes again at her request. They talked back and forth for a few hours. He questioned her about the porn industry and venereal diseases, and revealed that wife Melania and himself no longer shared a bedroom. “You remind me of my daughter,” he said (still in her version). He showed her that he was on the cover of a financial magazine. She accused him of posturing. He suggested she could be considered for a role on his TV show The Apprentice. After drinking a few bottles of water, she went to the toilet via the bedroom. She peeked, she admitted, into his toiletry bag.
When she left the toilet, Trump, in her account, was half undressed on the bed. The details that followed were too much of a good thing, according to the defense and the judge. Not so much that they did it in a missionary position and without a condom, but because they dared to speak of ‘power inequality’.
“It seemed like the room started spinning.” She wanted to leave the hotel room, but Trump blocked the exit, albeit “not in a threatening manner.” He was ‘bigger and heavier’ than her. “I think I blacked out.” But she did not want, she continued, to imply that she was being drugged. ‘The next thing I knew I was on the bed. I stared at the ceiling. I didn’t know how I got there.”
She was upset when she left him, she said. She was shaking so hard that she could barely buckle her shoes. They were “good together,” Trump said in farewell.
After the one-off sex between Daniels and Trump, several contacts followed, by telephone but also in person, although no longer sexual. The very next day she met Trump again in Lake Tahoe. Trump informed her on subsequent occasions that it had not been possible to get her in The Apprentice to get. And he was still looking for sex, she suggested, but she managed to escape, sometimes feigning a trip, other times having a period.
At that time, she also said, there was nothing secret about their contacts. When rumors about the ‘affair’ started to circulate, she wanted to tell her story as early as 2011. But the magazine InTouchthat had promised her $15,000 did not publish the interview. Around that time, she was threatened in a parking lot by a man who urged her to stop telling her story. She didn’t report it.
In the weeks before the presidential elections of November 2016, it once again became possible to monetize the ‘affair’. As Trump’s communications director Hope Hicks testified Friday, the campaign had entered crisis mode after a leaked Access Hollywood recording. It was thought that any subsequent scandal could be fatal to the campaign. Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen was also panicky when he heard about the account that Daniels wanted to publish. At the last minute, he paid $130,000 in hush money to Daniels from his own pocket. Trump and the Trump Organization paid him back in full after some reminders, spread over many months.
The payment of that hush money was leaked in early 2018, more than a year after Trump became president.
Judge Merchan interrupted Daniels several times during her account, sometimes on his own, sometimes at the request of Trump’s defense. The judge was clearly not pleased with the details and Daniels’ statements indicating coercion. So far she had talked about consensual sex. The admission of unproven accusations led to the overturning of a conviction of Harvey Weinstein in New York a few weeks ago. In this case, Judge Merchan did not consider it appropriate to declare the trial null and void. He will, however, instruct the jury to ignore that part of the testimony.
The defense also had to endure it. Donald Trump “cursed audibly,” Merchan said, and “visibly shook his head” during Daniels’ testimony. The judge called that ‘contemptuous’ and ‘with the potential to intimidate the witness’. “I won’t tolerate that.”
Does she hate Trump? ‘Yes’
Prosecutors wanted details from Daniels to give credibility to her account of the meeting with Trump. The cross-examination by Trump’s lawyer, Susan Necheles, was intended to undermine Daniels’ credibility in general, without referring to the meeting with Trump. Daniels has already given a lot of food for doubt in her previous press statements. She also denied the affair in 2018, but signed that statement with a fake signature.
She has already claimed just about everything about her revelations. She wanted to keep the sex a secret so as not to endanger her own safety. She wanted – in another version – to make the affair public ‘to remain in control of her own story’. She wasn’t in it for the money, and when hush money did come, she wasn’t involved determining the amount, but ‘everyone wants to make money’.
I want him to be held accountable.
The defense tried to argue that Daniels has been making money from her revelations/lies for years, including through a book. Necheles suggested Daniels made up the threat in 2011.
Does she hate Trump? the lawyer asked. “Yes,” was the answer.
Does she want him in jail?
“I want him to be held accountable.”
Necheles also confronted Daniels with a tweet in which she proclaimed that she would dance if Trump ends up in jail.
She called him an “orange turd.”
Yes, Daniels admitted, but that was in response to the swear words he had used for her: “horse face” and “pervert” (sleazebag).
The cross-examination will continue on Thursday.
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