Donald Trump’s criminal trial entered a new stage on Tuesday with testimony from Stormy Daniels, an adult film star at the center of his hush-money scandal, who told jurors that they had a sexual liaison in 2006 that left her nervous and ashamed.
“My hands were shaking so hard that I was having a hard time getting dressed,” said Daniels, who told jurors that she had gone to Trump’s Lake Tahoe hotel room under the belief that they would be getting dinner after meeting there.
The two had met earlier that day at a celebrity golf match across town; Daniels was there for Wicked Pictures, the company she worked for at the time, which was a sponsor.
“The players would come around, you’d stay at your hole that had your company’s logo, [you’d] give them water or towels,” she said.
They didn’t discuss much, but Daniels’s boss told Trump that she was also a director. Trump, she recalled, said she must be pretty smart if she directed films and didn’t just perform in them. They ran into each other again at a room where event sponsors set up tables with free merchandise.
“He did remember us from the golf course – he remembered me specifically, that I was ‘the smart one’,” Daniels said. At one point, one of Trump’s bodyguards came over and told Daniels that he wanted her to join him for dinner. She said no.
Daniels said she didn’t consider the invitation again until later, when there was a scheduled company dinner she didn’t want to attend. Daniels’s colleague told her that she should take Trump up on his invitation.
“‘It’ll make a great story, he’s a business guy, what would possibly go wrong,’ that was his words to me,” Daniels recalled. He thought it might also be good for her career.
She and Trump’s bodyguard coordinated and she was directed to his hotel across the city, and told to take a specific elevator to the penthouse. “He was wearing silk or satin pyjamas that I immediately made fun of him for, and said, does Mr Hefner know you stole his pyjamas?” Daniels said, referring to the late pornographer and Playboy founder, Hugh Hefner.
“I told him to go change and he obliged.”
Since it was still early, they decided to chat for a while before getting dinner. Trump repeatedly grilled Daniels on her time in the adult industry, including: “What about testing? Do you worry about STDs?”
He asked whether she had been tested. “Yes, of course, and I volunteered it as well,” she said.
“He asked me, oh, well, have you ever had a bad test, I said: ‘Nope, I can show you my entire record’,” Daniels recalled.
She said there was also a very brief discussion of Melania, Trump’s wife, during which he said they slept in separate rooms. Daniels said she had to use the restroom at some point, as she had had several bottles of water. Trump had come into the bedroom area of the suite, and was on the bed in his boxers and a T-shirt.
“At first I was just startled, like a jump scare,” Daniels said. “I just thought: Oh, my God, what did I misread to get here? The intention is pretty clear if someone’s stripped down to their underwear and on the bed.”
She tried to make a joke and leave, but he stood up between her and the door. “At some point, did you wind up on the bed having sex with him?” prosecutor Susan Hoffinger asked.
“Yes,” Daniels said.
During their conversation at the hotel, they discussed The Apprentice, Daniels said. She told him there was no way she would be allowed on network TV due to her status in the adult industry. He rejected this idea, then appeared to compare Daniels to his daughter, Ivanka Trump: “You remind me of my daughter. She is smart and blonde and beautiful and people underestimate her as well.”
Daniels, who wore a billowy black top and glasses with black frames, delivered her testimony with a rapid fire of words, so much so that she was asked several times to slow down, suggesting nervousness. At one point, Daniels sipped water from a plastic cup.
Hoffinger also tried to carry out pre-emptive strikes against a major defense argument on Daniels – that she’s not only motivated by money, but motivated to testify because she owes Trump more than hundreds of thousands in legal fees following a failed lawsuit against him.
Daniels said that in 2011, a man approached her at a Las Vegas car park and threatened her against coming forward. Her former attorney, Michael Avenatti, publicized a sketch of the man, and then filed a defamation suit after Trump denied involvement.
Daniels said she had thought a defamation claim was “risky” and “not worth it” but that Avenatti filed it without her permission. The case was thrown out, in Trump’s favor, and Daniels now owes him more than $500,000 in legal fees.
Daniels responded with an emphatic “no” when asked whether Avenatti was still her lawyer. Why? “Because I fired him and he was later found guilty of stealing,” she said.
When Daniels first took the stand, Trump leaned back in his chair with a passive look on his face.
Prosecutors allege that in 2015, Trump, his then lawyer Michael Cohen and tabloid honcho David Pecker plotted to bury stories that could thwart his Republican presidential bid. Cohen allegedly shuttled a $130,000 hush-money payment to Daniels less than two weeks before the 2016 presidential election, to keep her from going public about her claimed sexual liaison with Trump.
Cohen transferred money to Daniels’s lawyer via a limited liability company he established specifically for the transaction, called Essential Consulting LLC. He allegedly used an LLC so that the payment would not be tracked back to him and, thus, Trump.
Trump is charged with falsifying business records in relation to repaying Cohen. Prosecutors allege that Trump falsely listed these repayments as legal services in business documents.
Daniels’s testimony came one day after Judge Juan Merchan warned Trump that he could face jail if he kept violating a gag order.
The proceedings on Monday – which featured testimony from Deborah Tarasoff, a Trump Organization accounts payable supervisor, and Jeffrey McConney, the company’s former comptroller – were overshadowed by Merchan finding Trump in criminal contempt for the 10th time before they even took the stand.
Merchan’s decision comes just days after he found Trump in criminal contempt, and hit him with a $9,000 fine, over other comments that had flouted the order that bars him from discussing trial witnesses or jurors.
“So as much as I do not want to impose a jail sanction, I want you to understand that I will, if necessary and appropriate, Merchan said.
The testimony from McConney and Tarasoff sought to place Trump at the center of his company and personal finances – to undermine any defense argument that he was not at the helm of bill-paying.
Daniels’s testimony, on the heels of McConney and Tarasoffs’s time in court, and Merchan’s warning mark a difficult week for the defense. Before Daniels’s testimony resumed after a lunch break, one of Trump’s lawyers, Todd Blanche, asked Merchan to throw out the case because of extraneous details in her comments.
“We move for a mistrial based on the testimony this morning,” Blanche said. “There’s no way to unring that bell, in our view.”
He noted how Daniels had described feeling “blacked out” and had remarked that Trump did not use a condom.
“Aside from pure embarrassment,” Blanche told Merchan, these details did nothing but “inflame the jury”.
“I agree that there are probably some things that would have been [left] better unsaid,” Merchan said. “In fairness to the people, I think your witness was a little difficult to control” but still, he said, details came in that should not have.
Merchan said “I don’t believe we’re at the point” where a mistrial was warranted.
Defense attorney Susan Necheles did come out swinging in her cross-examination, trying over and over again to convey Daniels as a money-hungry bounder, and nothing more. Didn’t she get into pornography because she wanted money? Did she hate Trump? (To that question, Daniels replied: “Yes.”)
Necheles pressed on with her suggestion that Daniels was trying to shake down Trump by coming forward in 2016.
“You were looking to extort money from President Trump, right?”
“False,” Daniels said.
“Well, that’s what you did, right?”
“False!”
