Stormy Daniels gives evidence about one-night affair with Donald Trump
Stormy Daniels has given a lurid and explicit account of her night with Donald Trump almost two decades ago that now has the former president facing criminal charges.
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Porn star Stormy Daniels has testified in graphic detail about her one-night fling with Donald Trump that is now at the centre of the former president’s hush money trial.
In an extraordinary hearing in the Manhattan Criminal Court, Ms Daniels described her 2006 tryst with the billionaire, saying she misread the situation in his hotel room and “blacked out” during the brief encounter that later left her feeling ashamed.
Mr Trump scowled during her salacious evidence about an affair he has always denied, and his lawyers argued her testimony should result in the termination of the unprecedented trial.
In 2016, he paid Ms Daniels $US130,000 to keep quiet about her claims on the eve of the US election. Mr Trump – who is the presumptive Republican nominee for this year’s election – is now fighting 34 criminal charges of falsifying business records related to the payment.
In her long-awaited court appearance, Ms Daniels described meeting Mr Trump at a celebrity golf tournament at Lake Tahoe and thinking he was “older than my father”.
She initially declined his offer of dinner through his bodyguard by saying: “F*** no.” But she laughed as she recalled her publicist encouraging her to go by telling her: “What could possibly go wrong?”
Ms Daniels said that when she arrived at Mr Trump’s penthouse suite, he was wearing satin pyjamas like Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, and that she asked him to change.
They then discussed her career in the adult film industry, with Mr Trump asking her “very well thought-out business questions” and suggesting she could appear on his hit TV show Celebrity Apprentice.
She expressed doubts about that, prompting Mr Trump to say: “You remind me of my daughter because she’s smart, blonde and beautiful, and people underestimate her.”
Ms Daniels also testified that Mr Trump asked if she was married or had a boyfriend, and that when the conversation turned to his wife Melania – several months after their wedding – he told her they did not sleep in the same room.
Mr Trump also brandished a magazine in which he was pictured on the cover, Ms Daniels said, telling the court she called him “arrogant and pompous” and spanked him with the magazine “right on the butt”.
After using his bathroom, the porn star said she found Mr Trump on his bed wearing a T-shirt and boxer shorts, before he stood up and blocked her way to the door. She said there was an “imbalance of power” between them but that he did not act “in a threatening manner”.
Ms Daniels said she was startled and wondered what she “misread to get here”.
“Next thing I know, I was on the bed,” she said, adding that she “blacked out” even though she did not drink alcohol or take drugs, and that she did not remember taking her clothes off.
Ms Daniels described it as a brief encounter in which Mr Trump did not use a condom, with his lawyers objecting when she described the position they were in.
“I didn’t say anything at all … I just left as fast as I could,” she said.
“I told very few people that we had actually had sex because I felt ashamed that I didn’t stop it.”
Judge Juan Merchan scolded her and the prosecutors for the “unnecessary” amount of detail shared during her testimony.
Eric Trump, the former president’s son who was in the courtroom, accused the prosecutors of being “giddy by this salacious show” as he called the case against his father “a massive extortion ploy”.
Ms Daniels also recalled meeting Mr Trump in public and speaking to him on the phone on several other occasions after their one-night encounter.
He called her “honey bunch”, she said, and even introduced her to Karen McDougal – a former Playboy model who also claimed to have had an affair with him and received a hush money payment in 2016 – at a party to launch his vodka brand.
Ms Daniels testified that she was not motivated by money but to “get the story out” when her lawyer Keith Davidson offered to sell her story before the 2016 election to Australian journalist Dylan Howard, the editor of the National Enquirer.
His boss David Pecker – who ran the American Media, Inc. tabloid empire that published the National Enquirer – had previously given evidence about how he and Mr Howard directed Ms Davidson to Mr Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen to negotiate to purchase her story.
Ms Daniels also told the court of an incident in Las Vegas in 2011 when she was threatened not to go public about her claim of an affair with Mr Trump by a man in a car park in front of her young daughter.
Todd Blanche, Mr Trump’s lawyer, moved for a mistrial after two hours of Ms Daniels’s evidence, arguing her testimony was “way different than the story she was peddling in 2016”.
“She testified today about consent, about danger, and that’s not the story she was peddling,” he said.
“Now we’ve heard it, and it is an issue. How can you unring the bell?”
But prosecutor Susan Hoffinger said Ms Daniels’s account was “highly probative” of Mr Trump’s intent and his “motive for paying this off”.
Judge Merchan refused to call off the trial, although he admonished Mr Trump’s lawyers by saying he was “surprised that there were not more objections” during her testimony.
“There were some things that probably would’ve been better left unsaid,” he said.
“Having said that, I don’t believe we’re at a point where a mistrial is warranted.”
‘Put you in jail’: Trump’s last warning
Donald Trump faces a stint behind bars if he breaches a gag order in his criminal trial again, with a judge issuing a stern final warning after the former US president’s repeated violations.
Judge Juan Merchan told Mr Trump he would “have to consider a jail sanction” as he held him in contempt for a tenth time at the Manhattan Criminal Court.
The former president had already been fined $US9000 for violating the order that bars him from attacking jurors, witnesses and others involved in the unprecedented case, in which he is charged with falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment.
On Monday (local time), Judge Merchan slapped him with another $US1000 fine for complaining that he faced a “very unfair situation” with the selection of jurors in an area that was “95 per cent Democrats”.
Mr Trump shook his head as Judge Merchan handed down his ruling, telling the 77-year-old that while a jail term was “truly a last resort”, he would act if he continued to violate the gag order in a “direct attack on the rule of law”.
“Mr Trump, it’s important you understand the last thing I want to do is put you in jail. You are the former president of the United States and possibly the next president as well,” the judge said, noting that Mr Trump is the presumptive Republican candidate for this year’s election.
“The magnitude of this decision is not lost on me, but at the end of the day, I have a job to do.”
“So as much as I don’t want to impose a jail sanction … I want you to understand that I will if necessary and appropriate.”
The former president responded outside the courtroom by saying: “Our constitution is much more important than jail. It’s not even close. I’ll give that sacrifice any day.”
In his written order, Judge Merchan said Mr Trump had “not only called into question the integrity, and therefore the legitimacy of these proceedings, but again raised the spectre of fear for the safety of the jurors and of their loved ones”.
A juror had dropped out on the eve of the trial because she feared she would be identified.
Judge Merchan wrote that it was “apparent that monetary fines have not, and will not, suffice to deter” Mr Trump, saying he was “on notice that if appropriate and warranted, future violation of its lawful orders will be punishable by incarceration”.
Moments before the judge handed down his decision, Mr Trump ranted outside the courtroom that he was “totally conflicted” and complained that he had “taken away my constitutional right to speak”.
At the start of the trial’s fourth week, Mr Trump said prosecutors had “absolutely no case”.
“Even the witnesses they want to bring up, they have nothing to do with the case,” he told reporters.
“This is a ridiculous situation, not fair … but we will fight.”
He is accused of falsifying business records to cover up $US130,000 paid to porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 US election to silence her claim that they had a brief affair.
Originally published as Stormy Daniels gives evidence about one-night affair with Donald Trump
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