Eyes wide shut to endure his dark and Stormy fright
Dressed in black with most of her blonde hair tied back, Stormy Daniels shared a vivid account of how she met Donald Trump. The former president didn’t look up.
Stormy Daniels leant forward and peered around the edge of the judge’s bench. She was midway through a vivid account of how she met Donald Trump.
“Do you see Mr Trump in court today?” a prosecutor asked.
She pointed. “Navy blue jacket,” she said. “Second at the table.”
Trump did not look up. His eyes were closed.
The alleged affair at the heart of the first trial of a former president of the US began with a “brief encounter”, Daniels said. But not the type with buttoned-up Brits and a bit of grit in the eye. She was under contract at adult film company Wicked Pictures, which had sponsored a hole at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe in 2006.
“Yes, that’s very funny,” she said. “An adult film company sponsoring one of the holes.”
Daniels, 45, was in a black dress, a black gown over her shoulders. It looked like she was graduating from college. Most of her blonde hair was tied back, but tendrils framed her face. Oval spectacles rested on her head and she put them on to testify.
Trump’s bodyguard, Keith Schiller, had asked if she would join Trump for dinner, she said. Her initial reaction was “ ‘F no,’ with an expletive,” she said. She was 27. “I knew he was as old or probably older than my father.” She ended up in Trump’s suite, having what was billed as a pre-dinner chat, she said.
He asked about magazine covers she had posed for but would “not let me finish”, she said. “Like he wanted to one up me,” showing her a magazine with him on the cover. She was not impressed, “not that I made a habit of reading financial magazines as a 27-year-old stripper”. She got cross, she said. “Someone should spank you with that, because that’s the only interest I have. He rolled it up, gave it to me. I said ‘Turn around’, and I swatted him.”
“Where did you swat him?” Susan Hoffinger, the prosecutor, asked.
“On the butt,” she said. After that “he was much more polite”.
Trump’s eyes remained closed.
Susan Necheles, the one female lawyer in his team, was in the hot seat to his right, indicating that she would lead the cross-examination. Before the jury arrived, she rose to complain about the prospect of Daniels mentioning “details of sexual acts”. This is a case about business records, she said. Trump denies falsifying some of his, to conceal a $US130,000 so-called “hush money” payment to Daniels weeks before the 2016 election, to stop her from telling the electorate she had slept with him. It would be “unduly prejudicial” for Daniels to tell the jury about it, Necheles declared.
“When you say details of a sexual act, what do you mean?” judge Juan Merchan asked, his voice level, as if they were talking about a balance sheet. “That they had sex?”
Hoffinger insisted the jury needed to hear it. They would “omit some details we think are too salacious” and not seek descriptions of the former president’s genitals, she said. “But … her narrative completes the story … the events that precipitated the payoff.”
Merchan said he would allow it, though by the time Daniels was describing herself lying on a bed in Trump’s hotel room, looking at the ceiling, the judge jumped in to curtail her testimony.
First, prosecutors called Sally Franklin, a publisher at Penguin Random House, who read from a Trump book, Think Like a Billionaire. Franklin did not throw herself into the part. “I always sign my cheques,” she read, her voice flat. “So I know where my money’s going.”
Then it was Stormy time. She arrived via a side door and told the prosecutor to call her Stormy, or Daniels. Chatting to Trump in his hotel suite, in 2006, she said she excused herself to go to the lavatory, noting the Old Spice by the sink. Emerging, she found him “posing” in a boxer short and shirts. “He was just up on the bed, like this,” she said, flinging her head back and resting it on one hand. “I just felt, oh my God, what did I misread to get here?” she said.
What followed was brief, she said. Afterwards, getting dressed, it was dark and “it was really hard to get my shoes on because my hands were shaking so hard. These little tiny gold heels with strappy buckles,” she said. “He said: ‘Oh, it was great! Let’s get together again, honey bunch!’ ”
He couldn’t have meant like this – in the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse: her on the witness stand, him at the defence table, eyes still closed.
The Times
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