When Donald J. Trump met Stormy Daniels, he was a 60-year-old married mogul at the height of reality TV fame, and she, at 27, was a Louisiana native raised in poverty and seeking stardom in the adult film industry.
But that casual meeting in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, nearly two decades ago is now at the center of the first criminal trial of an American president.
This week, Daniels took the witness stand in Donald Trump’s trial to tell her side of the story, often with explicit details.
The charges against Trump stem from the affair they had during a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe in 2006. A story she wanted to tell a decade later, in the final days of the presidential campaign. Trump’s longtime lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, paid Daniels $130,000 in cash before Election Day to keep her quiet. The former president is accused of falsifying business records to cover up reimbursements made to Cohen for that payment.
In testimony and under oath, Daniels revealed intimate details about Trump, so intimate that the judge had to interrupt her several times. He hinted that certain parts were gratuitously vulgar.
Daniels said Trump invited her to dinner in his lavish hotel suite in Lake Tahoe. He answered the door wearing silk pajamas. She said she playfully hit him with a magazine when he got a bit rough. And when she asked about his wife, he told her not to worry, claiming they didn’t even sleep in the same room.
Daniels then recounted details of the sexual encounter itself. It happened, she said, after she returned from the bathroom and found Trump in boxers and a T-shirt. She tried to leave, and he blocked her path, although not, she said, in a threatening way. The sex was brief, she said, and although she never said no, there was a “power imbalance.”
“I was looking at the ceiling and wondering how I got there,” she told the jury, adding that Trump did not use a condom.
Daniels’s testimony is a stunning moment in American political history: a porn star, in front of a former and potentially future president, telling the world about what she was once paid to keep quiet.
Daniels, 45, has widely shared her story – with prosecutors, reporters, her friends, in a book – but never to jurors, and not with Trump in the room, listening and shaking his head at what he heard. The former president and current Republican candidate has always denied any involvement with Daniels.
The irony of fate is that Trump is being criminally tried for a story that began with a payment to keep his affair with Daniels from surfacing on the eve of the 2016 presidential elections as he runs for a second presidential term.
Over the years, Daniels has built her fame adjacent to Trump. She has sold products, filmed a documentary, given high-profile interviews, and written a book so revealing that it even included detailed descriptions of the former president’s genitals.
Will Daniels’s story change the course of American politics this time?
Source: The New York Times