Stormy Daniels testified in vivid detail about her alleged encounter with Trump at a hotel in Navada.
New York:
Adult film star Stormy Daniels says Donald Trump told her in 2006 that having sex with him was the only way she would get out of the “trailer park.” Nearly two decades later, she testified against Trump as a crucial witness for prosecutors securing the first criminal conviction of a former U.S. president.
A Manhattan jury on Thursday found Trump, 77, guilty of covering up his reimbursement to former lawyer Michael Cohen for a $130,000 payment to Daniels to buy her silence before the 2016 election about the alleged sexual encounter, which occurred while he was married to his wife. third wife, Melania.
Trump, Democratic President Joe Biden’s Republican opponent in the Nov. 5 election, has pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up the payment and denies the meeting.
Daniels, 45, was sharp and confident under cross-examination in response to probing questions designed to undermine his credibility. At one point, defense attorney Susan Necheles sought to draw a parallel between her work as a writer and director of pornographic films and the story of her encounter with Trump.
“If that story wasn’t true, I would have written it to be much better,” Daniels responded.
Daniels testified in vivid detail about her alleged encounter with Trump on the rooftop of a hotel in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, where the two met at a celebrity golf tournament. She said Trump invited her to dinner in his hotel suite, and during their conversation he suggested she appear on his reality television show, “The Apprentice.” She said at one point she went to the bathroom and came out to find Trump in bed in his boxer shorts.
“He said… ‘I thought you were serious about what you wanted. If you ever want to get out of that trailer park,’” Daniels said.
She said she “passed out” and did not remember how she got into bed without clothes, but emphasized that she had not consumed drugs or alcohol. She made it clear that she didn’t enjoy the sex that followed — but she also didn’t refuse Trump’s advances.
“I was trying to think about something other than what was going on there,” she said.
BEST STUDENT, EXOTIC DANCER
Daniels, whose name is Stephanie Clifford, testified that she grew up with a single, neglectful mother in low-income Louisiana. She said she graduated in the top 10 percent of her high school class, edited the school newspaper and was accepted to a university in Texas to study veterinary medicine, but couldn’t afford to attend.
She said that at age 17 she worked as an exotic dancer on the weekends to support herself, and later went into nude modeling and adult film work. She said she became one of the youngest directors in pornography, won many industry awards and landed roles in TV shows and films such as “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up.”
The year following the payment, Daniels testified, was the best of his life; she was writing and directing successful films, riding horses and raising her daughter to be a straight-A student. But she said her life turned into “chaos” when the Wall Street Journal published an article in 2018 revealing the alleged tryst and reward.
“It blew my cover,” she told prosecutor Susan Hoffinger. “We were excluded from their playgroups, from the stable.”
Trump’s lawyers sought to portray Daniels as having benefited from the publicity that resulted from the story of the alleged encounter, part of an effort to lay the groundwork to argue that she lied to make money. They displayed merchandise for jurors on their website, including a candle with her photo reading “Stormy, Saint of Indictments”, and showed jurors posters from the “Make America Horny Again” strip club tour she went on following news of the alleged meeting be publicized.
Despite the lurid details, Necheles sought to highlight that Daniels’ testimony was ultimately tangential to the case.
When the defense attorney asked Daniels if she knew about the business records at the center of the case, Daniels responded, “I don’t know anything about his business records, no. Why would I?”
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