Stormy Daniels pushed back on combative questions. Here’s the latest.

 

Matthew Haag Reporting on Trump's criminal trial

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/05/09/nyregion/trump-trial-stormy-daniels

 

Stormy Daniels pushed back on combative questions. Here’s the latest.

 

During more than seven hours of searing testimony spread over two days, Stormy Daniels recounted under oath a one-night sexual encounter she said she’d had with Donald J. Trump, described taking a $130,000 payment in return for her silence, and swung between defiance and vulnerability in the face of combative questions from his lawyers.

 

“You made all this up, right?” a lawyer for Mr. Trump asked, to which Ms. Daniels responded with a forceful “No.” And when the lawyer suggested that Ms. Daniels, a porn star, had experience with “phony stories about sex,” she responded that the sex in such films is “very much real, just like what happened to me in that room.”

 

Here’s what to know:

 

Key testimony: Ms. Daniels was often times defiant during her testimony, including when the defense attacked her for hawking merchandise to supporters. She responded by likening it to Mr. Trump’s own merchandising. But at other times, Ms. Daniels was seemingly on the verge of tears. Asked by a prosecutor, Susan Hoffinger, about the effect these events had on her life, Ms. Daniels said she’d had to hire security, move several times and take extra precautions because of her daughter. Asked if publicly telling the truth had been a net positive or net negative for her, she responded, “Negative.”

 

Credibility attacked: The lawyer for Mr. Trump, Susan Necheles, spent more than two hours on Thursday attempting to undermine Ms. Daniels’s credibility, including her reasons for accepting the hush-money payment from Mr. Trump’s one-time fixer, Michael D. Cohen. The lawyer accused Ms. Daniels of being motivated by greed, which Ms. Daniels denied, although she acknowledged accepting Mr. Cohen’s offer because she was “running out of time,” an apparent reference to the looming election.

 

The payment is central to the case: The 34 felony counts of falsifying business records against Mr. Trump stem from his repayment of Mr. Cohen after he became president, and the recording of the checks as “legal expenses” at the Trump Organization. Mr. Trump, 77, has denied any wrongdoing. If convicted, he could face prison or probation.

 

More testimony: The witness who followed Ms. Daniels, Rebecca Manochio, a junior bookkeeper at Mr. Trump’s company, described how during his presidency she would mail him checks that needed his signature. She described working for Jeffrey S. McConney, the Trump Organization corporate controller who testified earlier in the trial that most of the reimbursements to Mr. Cohen came from Mr. Trump’s personal bank account.

 

Daniels, Day 1: On Tuesday, her first day on the stand, Ms. Daniels described — sometimes graphically and often hastily — having a liaison with Mr. Trump in 2006 after a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, Nev. Mr. Trump has long denied having had sex with Ms. Daniels.

 

The Daniels-Trump timeline: They met in July 2006, but the lives of Ms. Daniels and Mr. Trump intersected over the next decade and beyond. Read a timeline of their interactions.