Dear Commons Community,
Stormy Daniels, the adult film star who says she had a sexual encounter with Donald Trump, took the witness stand in the former president’s criminal trial yesterday, providing sometimes graphic testimony about a 2006 tryst she says they had in a hotel suite and the efforts to buy her silence in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. As reported by NBC News.
The vivid testimony added a jolt of tabloid sensationalism to proceedings that just a day earlier focused on comparatively mundane topics, such as corporate record-keeping and financial reimbursement practices. Trump set the stage in dramatic fashion before anyone even took their seats in the courtroom Tuesday: “I have just recently been told who the witness is today,” he said in a since-deleted social media post. “This is unprecedented, no time for lawyers to prepare.”
Daniels, wearing an all-black outfit and black eyeglasses, spoke in a conversational and hurried tone, occasionally looking directly at the jury box as she testified about her humble upbringing, her pornography career and her relationship with Trump. State Judge Juan Merchan repeatedly reminded her to keep her answers short and speak more slowly so the court recorder could keep up.
Trump, brows furrowed, stared straight ahead during most of Daniels’ deeply unflattering testimony and sometimes whispered with his lawyers at the defense table. He has pleaded not guilty to charges of falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments to Daniels, and he denies her claims of an affair. His lawyers sought to persuade jurors that Daniels wasn’t credible and that she was driven by greed.
Daniels described a tumultuous childhood and a “neglectful” mother before she chronicled how she entered the adult film business, first as a performer and later as a writer and director. But the dramatic highlight of her testimony concerned her first meeting with Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in 2006, when he was a reality television star as host of NBC’s “The Apprentice.”
In wide-ranging testimony about the 2006 encounter, Daniels told jurors that she was initially hesitant to accept a dinner invitation from Trump. She was 27 at the time, she said, and he was around 60 — her father’s age. But she ultimately took the advice of her publicist at the time, who she recalled saying: “It’ll make a great story. He’s a business guy. What could possibly go wrong?”
Daniels later described the moments she said Trump came on to her in a penthouse hotel suite, where he answered the door in “silk or satin” pajamas that reminded her of Playboy mogul Hugh Hefner. They spoke for two hours before she went to the restroom and returned to find him on the bed in his boxer shorts, she said. She testified that seeing him there felt “like a jump scare,” adding: “That’s when I had that moment where I felt like the room spun in slow motion.”
He didn’t force himself on her or “rush at me,” she said, but he implied he could help her. “I thought you were serious about what you wanted,” Daniels recalled Trump saying. She said she believes she “blacked out” at some point during sex, which was brief. Afterward, Trump told her “it was great,” called her “honey bunch” and suggested they get together again, Daniels testified. She said he hadn’t worn a condom. She said she tried to leave the hotel as quickly as possible.
Daniels told jurors that she felt ashamed that she didn’t stop the sexual encounter. In the months that followed, Trump and Daniels kept in touch. He suggested he could book Daniels a role as a competitor on a season of “The Apprentice,” she said, but that plan never came to fruition.
In the final days of the 2016 presidential race, Daniels accepted $130,000 from Trump’s team to sign a nondisclosure agreement about her alleged tryst with Trump. (Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer and “fixer” at the time, cut the check and later got reimbursed, a process that is at the center of the criminal charges against Trump.) The prosecution has tried to present the hush money payment as a part of a scheme to influence the outcome of the 2016 election.
Daniels testified that she understood that signing an agreement that barred her from talking about her sexual encounter with Trump required them to act like they’d never met. “We had to pretend like we didn’t know each other at all, basically,” she said.
In an exchange with prosecutor Susan Hoffinger, Daniels insisted that she didn’t care about the exact dollar figure at the heart of the nondisclosure agreement. “I didn’t care about the amount,” she said. “It was just, get it done.”
Daniels testified that her personal life descended into “chaos” after her contractual arrangement with Trump and Cohen became public in a 2018 article in The Wall Street Journal, recounting that she and her young daughter were ostracized from their social circles.
Trump harassed her, too. Hoffinger displayed a social media post from Trump and asked Daniels: “Who do you understand Mr. Trump to be referring to as ‘horseface’ and ‘sleazebag’ in this post?”
“Me,” Daniels replied.
In a frequently tense cross-examination by one of Trump’s lawyers, Daniels acknowledged that she despises Trump, said she hopes he is jailed if he’s found guilty — and insisted that she started calling him names publicly only because he mocked her first.
Her names for Trump were quite graphic and not appropriate for a family blog. They are available in the Trump trial public record!
Tony
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