Presidential foe, feminist hero
Stormy Daniels has gone from porn star to feminist icon. Just like Monica Lewinsky 20 years earlier, her story has been co-opted by both sides of politics.
Stormy Daniels is in Washington, only blocks from Donald Trump’s White House, taking off her clothes. US dollar bills thrown by the audience swirl around her like confetti as she prances on the stage at the strip club Cloakroom.
She smiles at the adoring crowd as she slowly removes her German maid costume while a man with a broom sweeps the dollar bills into a pile so she doesn’t trip on them.
In the US capital, where the obsession with Trump is endless, the arrival of the woman who claims to have had sex with the President has been a hot ticket for months.
But the audiences who come to see Daniels perform on her national Make America Horny Again tour are not the usual strip club crowd of middle-aged white males.
The crowd on this night has almost as many women as men and is sprinkled with soccer mums, academics and lawyers who seem to share a single unifying trait — a visceral dislike of Trump.
They have come to see not a stripper but, rather, their political hero — a living, breathing symbol of the anti-Trump resistance.
“I am here to support Stormy because she is a feminist who has stood up to Donald Trump,” says Mike, 52, a business consultant, as Daniels rubs her breasts into the face of the man next to him.
“For her to take on such a powerful misogynist is incredibly brave and liberating.”
Daniels, 39, says her “fan base is completely different” since she rose to prominence.
“Those (older white) guys are gone,” she said earlier this year. “It’s pretty much these packs of women — and they are angry.”
Several hours before her show, Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, is sitting among the bookshelves at Politics and Prose, a rambling bookstore beloved by Washington’s intellectual progressives.
She is promoting her book Full Disclosure, the story of her poor childhood, career as a stripper, adult-film star and director and, of course, her one-night stand with Trump.
The bookstore is bulging with hundreds of people. A total of 95 per cent of voters in this leafy corner of Washington backed Hillary Clinton over Trump in the 2016 presidential election.
When Daniels walks into the room, flanked by two huge bodyguards, the crowd erupts in cheers.
Just like the former White House intern Monica Lewinsky 20 years earlier, Daniels and her story have been co-opted by both sides of politics to fit their agendas.
To Republicans, she is an extortionist, holding a president to ransom for an alleged one-night stand many years ago to further her own career.
Daniels’s Twitter feed contains a daily litany of abuse from her many haters on the Right.
To Democrats, her legal and personal battle with the President has made her an unlikely darling. To many, she is an “only in America” blend of feminist icon and male fantasy figure.
Daniels is a Republican who lives in conservative Texas, owns a gun and is a star of adult movies, a genre often decried by feminists as demeaning to women. That doesn’t seem to matter.
“Stormy is standing up to the President, and that’s why I like her,’’ says Alison, a schoolteacher, as she sips on a vodka and cranberry while watching a naked Daniels cavort across the stage.
Yet Daniels is wary of losing control of her own story by being labelled either a hero or a feminist.
She admits she is cashing in on her sudden fame but says she is not trying to make a political statement.
“Yes, I’m getting more job offers now but tell me one person who would turn down a job offer making more than they’ve been making, doing the same thing they’ve always done,” she says.
Daniels argues that she is simply a thrice-married mother of a young daughter who directs and acts in adult movies, has a passion for horses (she owns eight) and once had bad sex for two minutes with the man who would become President.
“People calling me crazy things like a hero and I’m, like, ‘I don’t remember a burning building’,” she tells the crowd at the bookstore. “It’s really hard to carry all that and be responsible for it but … I just do what I do, I guess.
“For me, the word ‘feminist’ has just taken on this life of its own and I just felt like it was putting me in a box and I don’t like that.
“It is sort of like how everyone was trying to shove the #MeToo movement on to me and that was infuriating because despite all the issues I had with Donald Trump, I was not assaulted or abused.
“I was never in fear. I made that decision and, although it was a regrettable one, it was still my choice and I just didn’t want to have that label that ‘I’m doing this because of f..king men’, because that’s just not me at all.’’
Americans are fixated more than ever by sex scandals involving presidents or White House aspirants, but that doesn’t mean they consider them to be deal-breakers any more.
When Daniels was interviewed on the US CBS network’s 60 Minutes program in March, more than 22 million Americans watched, giving the show its highest ratings in a decade.
The country was also transfixed last month by the six-episode series The Clinton Affair in which Lewinsky gave the fullest account yet of her relationship with then president Bill Clinton.
This month sees the Australian release of a new movie called The Front Runner, starring Hugh Jackman as Gary Hart, the Democrat whose late-1980s presidential campaign was famously derailed by reports of infidelity.
The media’s pursuit of Hart included reporters staking out his home, and they caught him meeting a young woman named Donna Rice while his wife was out of town.
Hart was forced to abandon his run for president. The fall of Hart was considered at the time to herald a new era in the way the media treats sex scandals involving presidents or contenders.
No longer would reporters turn a blind eye to infidelity as they did with John F. Kennedy amid the more restrained reporting mores of the early 1960s.
“You essentially thought that your private life was your private life and that nobody had a right to look into to,’’ Hart said as he recalled the scandal in an interview with CBS last month. “Hadn’t that been the case in America for 200 years? Hadn’t that been the case? Who changed the rules?’’
But the rules are continually changing as society changes and the media fragments into a 24-hour online behemoth, sucking up morsels of scandal like never before. Yet although the media is more eager than ever to report sex scandals, Americans seem to attach less weight to them than they did in Hart’s day.
Back then Hart warned that the country would inevitably get lower-quality presidents if people required all candidates to have lived a perfect life free of blemish.
“We’re all going to have to seriously question a system for selecting our national leaders that reduces the rest of this nation to hunters and our presidential candidates to being hunted,” he declared in 1987.
Yet since that time Clinton and Trump have been elected to the White House despite accusations of multiple affairs.
“I think the rules have changed,” Hart now says.
“If Donald Trump can have a fan base of 30 per cent to 40 per cent despite everything he’s done in life, all bets are off. Anybody can be president regardless.”
Americans have always been more puritanical about their leaders than Australians.
Australians have at times knowingly elected womanisers, heavy drinkers and atheists to the Lodge, believing the ability to do the job was what mattered most.
Despite Daniels’ claims of extramarital sex with Trump in 2006, the payment of $US130,000 in hush money and the President’s false denials of such payments, her story remains little more than a lurid sideshow in a rollercoaster presidency.
As far as scandals go, the Daniels affair has nowhere near the potency that the Lewinsky controversy had 20 years ago.
Clinton got in trouble for lying under oath about his relationship with Lewinsky — a lie that led Republicans to impeach him in the House of Representatives.
Trump, who denies having sex with Daniels, appears to have lied about his knowledge of hush money payments but, unlike Clinton, he was not under oath.
Even so, Trump may still be exposed because those payments could have violated campaign finance laws.
But, although Americans remain fascinated by presidential sex scandals, most do not believe they are a sackable offence.
During the Lewinsky scandal Republicans overplayed their hand by impeaching Clinton in the house, only to see the move rejected by the Senate.
Opinion polls at the time showed Americans did not think that lying about sex, even under oath, was reason to remove a president. Clinton left office with near record approval ratings.
But The Clinton Affair offers some reminders of the ugliness of the campaign Clinton supporters waged against the then 22-year-old Lewinsky, who was parodied across the country as the very epitome of a bimbo.
Lewinsky told her story in full for the first time in the hope people will see her side more readily than they did 20 years ago.
Unlike Daniels, however, Lewinsky has sought to harness the #MeToo movement in the telling of her story.
“Throughout history, women have been traduced and silenced,” she wrote earlier this year. “Now it’s time to tell our own stories in our own words.”
In the series Lewinsky talks frankly about how she fell in love with the president and how he broke her heart when he ended that relationship and dismissed her in public as “that woman”.
But with the passing of time, Lewinsky says she sees more clearly that the affair was not just an imbalance of power. “We now recognise that it constituted a gross abuse of power,” she says.
Daniels does not claim to be a victim and says she doesn’t want anyone to pity her.
She appears not to care about the vitriol hurled her way on social media and seems to revel in firing back. When someone with the Twitter name “anti-Liberal” calls her a “slut” Daniels replies, “Thank You! And proud of it!”
If someone threatens to release a sex tape of her she says they can have as many as they want “for $US29.95” ($41.57).
The legal battle between Trump and Daniels is now heating up. Daniels sued the President this year to break a non-disclosure agreement about the alleged affair, which she signed days before the 2016 election as part of the $US130,000 settlement.
But Daniels then launched a failed defamation lawsuit against Trump for comments he made after she released a sketch of a man she claims approached her in a Las Vegas carpark in 2011 and threatened her to keep quiet about the affair. Trump tweeted: “A sketch years later about a non-existent man. A total con job, playing the Fake Media for Fools (but they know it).”
Last week Trump’s lawyers launched their own counter-attack on Daniels, asking her to pay almost $US800,000 in lawyers’ fees and penalties for her failed defamation case as a deterrent against a “repeat filer of frivolous defamation cases”.
Daniels’ high-profile and controversial lawyer Michael Avenatti has described the move as “absurd and outrageous”. “You can’t just pick a number out of thin air in an effort to put my client under Donald Trump’s thumb and intimidate her,” he says.
Daniels doesn’t appear to have given much thought about her place in the pantheon of presidential sex scandals or whether people’s attitudes have changed.
An audience member at the Politics and Prose event asked: “Gary Hart recently resurfaced in the news. His career ended over an extramarital affair. The current President has been married three times, disparages women, pursues extramarital affairs and tries to cover them up through paid agreements. Still he has supporters, even among people who profess to have strong faith. What has changed?”
Daniels fell silent as she pondered the question.
“I don’t know. I honestly have no idea,” she says. “I wish I had a cool answer but I don’t.”
Cameron Stewart is also US contributor for Sky News Australia.
Trump’s good news day
Those repeated claims of no collusion now have credence.
A searing indictment of FBI
Americans deserve a full accounting of the missteps of James Comey and the FBI.