Stormy Daniels Testifies in Trump Trial: A Moment of Sordid History

Stormy Daniels was a 27-year-old Louisiana native who had grown up in poverty and was destined for the world of pornography, while Donald Trump was a 60-year-old married mogul at the height of his celebrity from reality television. At the time of their encounter, their romance looked short-lived.

However, that coincidental meeting in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, around 20 years ago started a series of circumstances that have led to the country's first-ever presidential criminal prosecution.

Daniels faced the porn star at the heart of his case face-to-face on Tuesday when he took the stand in that trial.

The accusations are related to her claim that she had sex with Trump at the Lake Tahoe celebrity golf event in 2006—a claim she was marketing ten years later, in the last days of the presidential campaign. Before Election Day, she received $130,000 in hush money from Trump's longtime fixer and attorney, Michael Cohen. The former president is suspected of fabricating financial records to conceal Cohen's reimbursements.

 
FILE — On Friday, May 3, 2024, former president Donald Trump attends his criminal trial at the New York State Supreme Court in New York. On Monday, the Manhattan court overseeing Trump's criminal trial found the former president in contempt and assessed a $1,000 fine for his repeated violations of a gag order that forbade him from disparaging jurors or witnesses.
(New York Times/Doug Mills)
During her brisk five-hour speech, Daniels detailed an encounter she had with Trump—who is currently 77 years old—which he has long denied. The courtroom was tense as her rambling testimony filled the eerie hush. She cracked jokes, but they fell flat.

She was on the stand for around thirty minutes when she started disclosing personal information about Trump, to the point where the judge objected to parts of her testimony. He made a blatantly offensive remark, and the defense asked for a mistrial.

Daniels said she received an invitation from the future president to supper in his lavish Lake Tahoe hotel suite. A silk pajama suited him for answering the door. She used a rolled-up magazine to spank him playfully when he was impolite. And when she inquired about his wife, he assured her that they didn't even share a room. This caused Trump to shake his head in disdain and say "bullshit" to his attorneys, loud enough that the court privately chastised him for being "contemptuous."

Daniels went on to describe the actual sex in graphic detail. She claimed it occurred when she saw Trump wearing a T-shirt and boxer shorts after returning from the restroom. He obstructed her path when she attempted to depart, but not in a menacing way, she claimed. She claimed that there was a "power imbalance" even though she never said no to the brief sex.

She told the jurors, "I was staring up at the ceiling, wondering how I got there," and disclosed that Trump had not worn a condom.

A porn star testifying in front of a past and maybe future president about something she had once been paid to keep quiet about was an incredible event in American political history and the trial's highlight act.

The 45-year-old Daniels has shared her narrative publicly, including with friends, reporters, and prosecutors. However, she has never testified in front of juries or with Trump present. Trump seemed unnerved by her presence on the stand, as she revealed his embarrassing details while testifying.

Daniels' story, however, exposes what the prosecution claims to be Trump's wrongdoing rather than being a mere kiss-and-tell tale. He is charged with masterminding the fictitious company documents scam in order to hide any evidence of their tryst, including the hush money, Cohen's reimbursement, and yes, the sex.

The testimony was portrayed by the defense as a slander, but Daniels gave the prosecutors some important information. She laid out the main plot of her meeting with Trump. Furthermore, she stated in her deposition that if she hadn't accepted the hush money from Trump's fixer in 2016, she would have related the same unsettling story.

However, the prosecutors who had summoned her appeared to have concerns about her testimony at times. Daniels stated in her testimony that she was driven to share her tale rather than pursue financial gain. Jurors may become skeptical since they have heard that she took the $130,000 and remained silent about her narrative for almost a year in exchange.

"I wasn't motivated by money," she stated. "It was not driven by money, but by fear."

The jury also witnessed Judge Juan Merchan reprimand Daniels at least twice and give her instructions to limit her answers to the questions posed to her. He even interrupted her testimony at one point when she was describing the sexual position she and Trump had taken.

Usually a stoic figure with a firm hold on his courtroom, Merchan displayed an uncommon amount of exasperation as the trial became more and more like a circus with the testimony taking a scurrilous turn.

Daniels was also ordered to slow down by him. She spoke quickly and was prone to long asides and laughs.

The judge indicated outside the jury's presence that Daniels' testimony "may have some credibility issues" and that "there were some things better left unsaid."

However, judge turned down the defense's request for a mistrial and invited Trump's attorneys to grill Daniels vigorously.

"More material for cross-examination, the more times this story has changed," he declared.

Susan Necheles, the attorney for Trump who oversaw the cross-examination, followed the judge's recommendation.

She portrayed Daniels as an opportunistic liar. She discovered passages from Daniels' book that seemed to indicate that her account had evolved over time. Necheles also suggested that Daniels had made up a narrative about a Trump fan threatening her and her kid in a parking lot in Las Vegas, which she had not told her child's father. This might have been a potentially problematic time for Daniels.

"You did not tell her father that her daughter's life was in danger, right?" Necheles enquired, perhaps sensing that the narrative was false.

Daniels was furious. She also performed a better job of parrying during certain cross-examination than she had while responding to the prosecution.

Daniels entered the trial at a critical juncture. Prosecutors had requested on Monday that two seasoned members of the Trump Organization's accounting team present before the jury the 34 documents they claim Trump fabricated in order to hide Cohen's payment for the hush money. These consist of twelve entries in Trump's ledger portraying the payments as typical legal fees, eleven invoices, eleven checks, and so on. Cohen is anticipated to make a statement and draw the link between the important papers and the scandalous information in the coming weeks. Daniels' testimony on Tuesday guided the jurors through the more offensive aspects of the case.

She started out by talking about her rough upbringing in Baton Rouge. She claimed that when she was little, her parents divorced.

She edited the school newspaper and aspired to become a veterinarian. She eventually started stripping, she claimed, since the pay was better than what she was getting shoveling manure at a horse stable.

She was involved in porn by the time she met Trump at the 2006 golf tournament. She started out as an actress but eventually made a name for herself as a producer and director.

She pointed Donald Trump as the man wearing a navy suit jacket when she was asked to identify him in the courtroom. Daniels made the unique former president seem like just another man in the courtroom while donning an all-black outfit and spectacles.

The majority of her testimony was devoted to recounting that initial meeting in Lake Tahoe. She was aware that Trump was a golfer and the host of "The Apprentice," the reality show that brought him back to prominence for a fresh audience. Daniels stated something interesting when she said she knew he was "as old or older than my father."

She claimed that later that day, she received an invitation to dinner from Trump's assistant. She claims he got her number, but her first thought was "eff no," which is an expletive.

However, her publicist gave her encouragement, asking, "What could go wrong?"

Subsequently, she took the jury into his hotel room, meticulously painting the expansive suite, capturing every detail, right down to the hue of the tiles.

Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by Press Time staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.