Stormy Daniels Tells a Story of Sex With Trump as
He Listens in Disgust
The porn star at the center of the former president’s
criminal trial testified about their encounter at a celebrity golf tournament
in 2006, a meeting that could shape American history.
By Ben
Protess, Jonah E. Bromwich, Maggie Haberman, Michael Rothfeld and Jonathan Swan
May 7, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/07/nyregion/trump-trial-stormy-daniels-testimony.html
When Donald
J. Trump met Stormy Daniels, their flirtation 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
porn-film 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.
And on
Tuesday, Ms. Daniels took the stand at that trial, bringing the former
president face to face with the porn star at the case’s center.
The charges
stem from her story of sex with Mr. Trump during that 2006 celebrity golf
tournament in Lake Tahoe, a story she was shopping a decade later, in the
closing days of the presidential campaign. Mr. Trump’s longtime lawyer and
fixer, Michael D. Cohen, paid her $130,000 in hush money before Election Day,
and the former president is accused of falsifying business records to cover up
reimbursements for Mr. Cohen.
Ms.
Daniels’s fast-paced testimony lasted nearly five hours, during which she
described an encounter with Mr. Trump, now 77, that he has long denied. Tension
gripped the courtroom, her garrulous testimony filling a heavy silence. She
made jokes; they did not land.
After about
a half-hour on the stand, she began to unspool intimate details about Mr.
Trump, so much so that the judge balked at some of the testimony. He implied it
was gratuitously vulgar, and the defense sought a mistrial.
Ms. Daniels
said the future president had 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 — prompting Mr. Trump to shake his head in disgust and mutter “bullshit”
to his lawyers, loud enough that it drew a private rebuke from the judge, who
called it “contemptuous.”
Ms. Daniels
then recounted the sex itself in graphic detail. It happened, she said, after
she returned from the bathroom and found Mr. 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, there was a “power imbalance.”
“I was
staring up at the ceiling, wondering how I got there,” she told the jury,
adding that Mr. Trump did not wear a condom.
The
testimony was an astonishing moment in American political history and a
crowning spectacle in a trial full of them: a porn star, across from a former
and potentially future president, telling the world what she was once paid to
keep quiet about.
Ms.
Daniels, 45, has told her story widely — to prosecutors, reporters, her
friends, in a book — but never to jurors, and not with Mr. Trump in the room.
Her appearance on the stand appeared to unnerve Mr. Trump as she aired his
dirty laundry, under oath, in mortifying detail.
But Ms.
Daniels’s story is not just a sordid kiss-and-tell tale; it spotlights what
prosecutors say was Mr. Trump’s criminality. He is accused of engineering the
false business records scheme to cover up all traces of their tryst: the hush
money, the repayment to Mr. Cohen and, yes, the sex.
While the
defense cast the testimony as a smear, Ms. Daniels provided prosecutors with
some useful details. She established the fundamental story of her encounter
with Mr. Trump. And she testified that she would have told the same
uncomfortable tale in 2016, had she not taken the hush money from Mr. Trump’s
fixer.
But her
testimony, at times, seemed problematic for the prosecutors who had called her.
Ms. Daniels testified that money was not her motivation, and that she wanted to
get her story out. That could draw skepticism from jurors, who have heard that
she accepted the $130,000 and, in exchange, did not tell her story for more
than a year.
“My
motivation wasn’t money,” she said. “It was motivated out of fear, not money.”
The jury
also saw the judge, Juan M. Merchan, scold Ms. 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 Mr. Trump assumed.
Justice
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 Ms. Daniels to slow down. She was a rapid-fire talker, prone to laughter
and lengthy asides.
Outside the
jury’s presence, the judge acknowledged that “there were some things better
left unsaid” in her testimony and suggested that Ms. Daniels might have
“credibility issues.”
Yet he
rejected the defense’s bid for a mistrial, instead inviting Mr. Trump’s lawyers
to mount an aggressive questioning of Ms. Daniels.
“The more
times this story has changed, the more fodder for cross-examination,” he said.
Susan
Necheles, the Trump lawyer who led the cross-examination, heeded the judge’s
advice.
She painted
Ms. Daniels as a lying opportunist. She unearthed excerpts from Ms. Daniels’s
book to suggest that her story had changed over time. And in a potentially
troublesome moment for Ms. Daniels, Ms. Necheles implied that she had
fabricated an account of a Trump supporter threatening her and her daughter in
a Las Vegas parking lot, a story she did not share with her baby’s father.
“Your
daughter’s life was in jeopardy and you did not tell her father, right?” Ms.
Necheles asked, the implication being that the story was phony.
Ms. Daniels
was indignant. And during some cross-examination, she parried effectively,
performing even better than she did with her answers to prosecutors.
Her
testimony brought full circle one of the earliest scandals that loomed over Mr.
Trump’s presidency. Ever since The Wall Street Journal broke the news six years
ago that Mr. Cohen had paid her to keep quiet, her story has changed the course
of American politics and laid the groundwork for the case.
Over the
years, Ms. Daniels has leaned into her Trump-adjacent fame. She has sold
merchandise, filmed a documentary, sat for high-profile interviews and written
a book that was so tell-all it included detailed descriptions of the former
president’s genitalia. Mr. Trump has also dished out insults that ridiculed her
appearance, calling her “horseface.”
But at
other times, Ms. Daniels appeared tortured, detailing the personal toll of
outsize exposure. Suddenly, she was not just a porn star but a threat to a man
who commands the most fervent political movement in modern American history.
She told reporters she was inundated by threats from Trump supporters, many of
which were graphic. She feared for her family and has divorced her third
husband, the father of her daughter.
“I have
been just tormented for the last five years or so,” she said in the opening
scene of “Stormy,” a documentary about her life that was released on Peacock.
“And here I am, I’m still here.”
Ms. Daniels
joined the trial at a pivotal moment. On Monday, prosecutors had asked two
veterans of the Trump Organization’s accounting department to show jurors the
34 records they say Mr. Trump falsified to conceal his reimbursement of Mr.
Cohen for the hush money. Those include 11 invoices, 11 checks and 12 entries
in Mr. Trump’s ledger that portrayed the payments as normal legal expenses.
In the
weeks ahead, Mr. Cohen is expected to take the stand and connect the dots
between the salacious details and the substantive documents. On Tuesday, Ms.
Daniels’s testimony took jurors through the smuttier elements of the case.
She began
by recounting a difficult childhood in Baton Rouge. Her parents split up when
she was young, she said.
She wanted
to be a veterinarian, and was editor of her high school newspaper. Eventually,
she began stripping, she says, because she earned more than she did shoveling
manure at a horse stable.
By the time
she met Mr. Trump at the golf tournament in 2006, she was a player in porn. She
was an actress, and would ultimately find her footing as a director and
producer.
Asked to
identify Mr. Trump in the courtroom, she called him out as the man in a navy
suit jacket. Ms. Daniels, dressed in all black and wearing glasses, reduced the
singular former president to just another man in the courtroom.
She spent
much of her testimony describing that first encounter in Lake Tahoe. When she
met Mr. Trump, she knew he was a golfer and the host of the “The Apprentice,”
the reality show that revived Mr. Trump’s celebrity for a new generation. In a
memorable line, Ms. Daniels said she also knew that he was “as old or older
than my father.”
Later that
day, she said, Mr. Trump’s aide approached and invited her to dinner. She says
he took her number, but that her initial reaction was “eff no,” abbreviating an
expletive.
But her
publicist encouraged her: “What could possibly go wrong?”
She then
transported jurors inside his hotel room, painting the sprawling suite in
minute detail, capturing every aspect down to the color of the tiles.
She said
Mr. Trump had taken an interest in her business and asked about unions,
residuals and health insurance, as well as about testing for sexually
transmitted diseases. “He was very interested in how I segued from becoming
just a porn star to writing and directing,” she said.
Ms. Daniels
said Mr. Trump told her, “You remind me of my daughter. She is smart and blond
and beautiful, and people underestimate her as well.”
She
recalled going into the bathroom to do her lipstick, where, she said, she
noticed gold tweezers and Old Spice.
Later, they
stayed in touch, she said. In 2007, they met at Trump Tower in New York, at a
Trump Vodka launch party in Los Angeles and at a Beverly Hills hotel — all
interactions that appeared to undercut Mr. Trump’s claims that he barely knew
her.
The jury
was also shown contact logs from Ms. Daniels’s phone and from Mr. Trump’s
assistant’s phone showing that they remained in touch. And when they did talk,
she said, Mr. Trump had a nickname for her: “honeybunch.”
They have
only spoken through lawyers since then, most notably during the hush-money
negotiations. When Ms. Necheles accused Ms. Daniels of using that effort to
“extort money from President Trump,” Ms. Daniels objected.
“False,”
she said.
“That’s
what you did, right?” Ms. Necheles persisted.
“False!”
Ms. Daniels shouted.
Reporting
was contributed by William K. Rashbaum, Kate Christobek, Jesse McKinley, Wesley
Parnell and Matthew Haag.
Ben Protess
is an investigative reporter at The Times, writing about public corruption. He
has been covering the various criminal investigations into former President
Trump and his allies. More about Ben Protess
Jonah E.
Bromwich covers criminal justice in New York, with a focus on the Manhattan
district attorney’s office and state criminal courts in Manhattan. More about
Jonah E. Bromwich
Maggie
Haberman is a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024 presidential
campaign, down ballot races across the country and the investigations into
former President Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman
Michael
Rothfeld is an investigative reporter in New York, writing in-depth stories
focused on the city’s government, business and personalities. More about
Michael Rothfeld
Jonathan
Swan is a political reporter covering the 2024 presidential election and Donald
Trump’s campaign. More about Jonathan Swan
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