Stormy Daniels, the porn actor paid hush money to keep an alleged affair with Donald Trump secret ahead of the 2016 election, has taken the stand Tuesday in the former president’s New York criminal trial.
Daniels, wearing black with her hair in a clip, smiled nervously as she entered the room, walking quickly toward the stand. She put on a pair of black, thick-rimmed glasses as she started.
Trump was whispering with his attorney, Todd Blanche, and watched Daniels as she prepared to begin her testimony.
The $130,000 payment to Daniels is at the heart of the Manhattan district attorney’s case against Trump, who faces 34 counts of falsifying business records for allegedly attempting to conceal the payoff. He has pleaded not guilty and denied any sexual relationship with Daniels.
The adult film actress’s appearance before the jury was long expected, but it wasn’t until Tuesday morning that Daniels’s attorney publicly confirmed she would be taking the stand later in the day.
Trump had unsuccessfully sought to block her trial testimony, insisting Daniels’s salacious story is false and would be unduly prejudicial to the former president.
Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, claims she and Trump first met in July 2006 at a celebrity golf tournament near Lake Tahoe — a year after Trump married his wife, Melania.
She says Trump invited her to his hotel suite, where they had sex. Trump also suggested she could be a contestant on “Celebrity Apprentice,” the real estate mogul’s television show where contestants vied to earn a role as his underling.
“He was like, ‘Wow, you — you are special. You remind me of my daughter,’” Daniels said in a 2018 interview with the CBS program “60 Minutes.” “You know, he was like, ‘You’re smart and beautiful, and a woman to be reckoned with, and I like you. I like you.’”
In earlier testimony, Trump’s longtime assistant, Rhona Graff, said she once saw Daniels at Trump Tower and believed the then-businessman wanted her on his show. She never appeared on the program.
Years later, in 2011, Daniels agreed to tell the story to a weekly tabloid magazine, but Trump’s then-fixer, Michael Cohen, intervened with threats to sue, and the story wasn’t published.
Daniels attempted to tell the story again in 2016, when Trump was running for president, prompting the hush money payment by Cohen and a nondisclosure agreement less than two weeks before the election.
Daniels later said she took the hush money payment because she was afraid for her life. “I was f‑‑‑ing terrified!” Daniels said in a recent documentary. “I mean, people have been suspiciously killed for political reasons.”
Updated 10:38 a.m.
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