Until her long-anticipated testimony at Donald Trump's Manhattan fraud trial Tuesday, the mainstream media had leaned on misleading terms like "affair" and "tryst" to describe the alleged 2006 sexual encounter between Stormy Daniels and the criminal defendant. So I was braced for callous reactions to her time on the witness stand, where the adult film actress described an encounter with Trump far more harrowing than titillating.
While making it clear that she was "not threatened either verbally or physically," what Daniels described also doesn't meet any common sense definition of the word "consensual." Trump, she said, bullied her. She didn't want it but didn't say no. "My hands were shaking," she recounted, telling the court that she felt "ashamed that I didn’t stop it." Still, she does not consider it assault. I worried, in that case, that her description would be treated as permission by the press to ignore some of the most alarming and uncomfortable aspects of what Daniels testified happened to her nearly two decades ago in Lake Tahoe.
