Porn star describes her night with Trump in detail in hush money case: ‘Like Playboy boss Hugh Hefner’

‘Mrs Daniels’ is nervous. Years after an adventure in a hotel room, she and former President Donald Trump meet again, now in a courtroom in New York.

Daniels talks so fast that the clerk can’t keep up. The judge asks whether she can speak a little slower. And would she please just answer the questions asked, without going into irrelevant details. Stormy Daniels (45) mentions this quite a bit during her testimony in the criminal case about the hush money she received in 2016. Donald Trump is being prosecuted because he allegedly had this illegally covered up in his accounting during campaign time.

Daniels – real name Stephanie Clifford – also uses her stage name in court and is consistently addressed as ‘Mrs Daniels’.

As far as we know, it is the first time in years that the porn star and the former president have met in person. Their first meeting in 2006 at a golf tournament in Nevada still haunts them eighteen years later.

Gold manicure set

By and large, Daniels’ story has been out in the open since The Wall Street Journal revealed that Daniels was paid $130,000 by Trump just before the 2016 presidential election to keep quiet about a sexual encounter.

In court she supplements the story under oath with juicy details. That Trump was wearing satin pajamas when she entered his hotel suite, for example. That she told him he looked like Playboy boss Hugh Hefner, and that she hit him with a magazine he was in, ‘right on his ass’.

Trump promised her a role in his reality show The Apprentice, she says. After talking for a while, she went to the toilet, where she saw a gold manicure set and a bottle of Old Spice. When she returned, Trump was sitting on the bed in his boxers, waiting for her.

Daniels leans back in the witness box and puts her hand on her neck to mimic how Trump posed.

Hush money payments

Trump’s lawyer complains to the judge. This case is about accounting, why does the jury need to know whether Trump used a condom? (He did not, Daniels explains.) Her emotions that evening are also irrelevant to a suspicion of fraud, the lawyer emphasizes. Daniels states that she felt like all the blood was draining from her hands and feet when she saw Trump on the bed. She doesn’t remember how she ended up on it, tried to think about something else during sex, and mainly wanted to get away as quickly as possible.

The prosecutor says it is necessary to go into details to establish Daniels’ credibility. But judge Juan Merchan also stated after the first hours that some things ‘could have been better left unsaid’. He intervened himself when Daniels started saying that she and Trump had sex in a missionary position, for example. That was deleted from the file.

The defense wants the judge to annul the case because of all the embarrassing information, but the judge does not agree.

The stories about a sexual escapade by a former president and current presidential candidate may be entertaining, but the real evidence in the criminal case against him was discussed the day before. An accountant and Trump administration assistant then testified about the emails, invoices and checks used to handle the hush money payments. This went through Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen. This was recorded in the books as ‘legal services’, the office clerks confirmed.

Box of tissues

When Daniels tells her story, Trump does his best to ignore her. He often looks straight ahead, without glancing at the right side of the room, where Daniels sits in a witness box.

There’s a box of tissues nearby just in case, but she doesn’t need them. In cross-examination she confidently speaks out. “You wanted to take money out of Donald Trump’s pocket,” his lawyer Susan Necheles accuses her. “Incorrect!” Daniels shouts.

Trump’s team paints the picture of a greedy woman who wanted to sell the story about the affair to make money. However, Daniels states that she wanted to go public about the affair because she was afraid. She was once threatened in a parking lot by an unknown man who told her to keep quiet about the matter.

Then she feared that the Trump camp wanted to do something to her. If a silence contract would bind her to Trump on paper, she would be safer, she believed. “I wanted to get the story out and make some money,” Daniels says eventually.

Notorious prison

Trump, like his lawyers, will be furious that his bedroom adventure is once again making headlines in all the American media, but he must keep a low profile. He has been fined several times for publicly defaming witnesses and others involved in the case, despite a court order to stop doing so.

This week the judge fined him again, this time $1,000. He sharply warned that next time a prison sentence could follow. “The last thing I want is to detain you, you are a former president and possibly the next president,” he said to Trump. “But your continued deliberate violations of court orders constitute a direct attack on the rule of law. I cannot allow this to continue.”

New York Mayor Eric Adams soon announced that the infamous prison on Rikers Island is ‘ready’ if necessary.

If the Public Prosecution Service can prove that Trump has indeed committed forgery with the aim of influencing the outcome of the elections, this is punishable. The maximum penalty for this is four years in prison.