Elizabeth Williams via AP)
Stormy Daniels entered the witness box on Tuesday at Donald Trump’s hush money trial, describing for jurors a sexual encounter the adult film actor says she had with him in 2006, which resulted in her being paid to keep silent during the presidential race 10 years later.
Jurors appeared riveted as Daniels, over the repeated objections of defence lawyers and occasional admonitions from the judge, offered a detailed and at times graphic account of an encounter Trump has denied.
Trump stared straight ahead as Daniels entered the courtroom, occasionally shaking his head and whispering to his lawyer.
The evidence was by far the most-awaited spectacle in a trial that has toggled between tabloidesque elements and dry record-keeping explanation.
A courtroom appearance by an adult film actor who says she had an intimate encounter with a former American president adds to the long line of historic firsts in the case, which was already laden with tawdry claims of sex, payoffs and cover-ups.
It is unfolding as the presumptive Republican nominee makes another bid for the White House.
Daniels was allowed to testify despite the repeated objections of defence lawyers, who, after the lunch break, demanded a mistrial for the first time over what they said were prejudicial and irrelevant comments.
“This is the kind of testimony that makes it impossible to come back from,” defence lawyer Todd Blanche said.
“How can we come back from this in a way that’s fair to President Trump?”
The judge rejected the defence’s request and said defence lawyers should have raised more objections during the testimony.
The Trump team later in the day used its opportunity to question Daniels to paint her as motivated by personal animus and profiting off her claims against Trump.
“Am I correct that you hate President Trump?” defence lawyer Susan Necheles asked Daniels.
“Yes,” she acknowledged.
Daniels’ statements are central to the case because in the final weeks of Trump’s 2016 Republican presidential campaign, his then-lawyer and personal fixer, Michael Cohen, paid her 130,000 dollars (£103,000) to keep quiet about what she says was an awkward and unexpected sexual encounter with Trump in July 2006 at a celebrity golf outing in Lake Tahoe.
Trump has pleaded not guilty.
Led by a prosecutor’s questioning, Daniels described how an initial meeting at a golf tournament, where they discussed the adult film industry, progressed to a “brief” sexual encounter that she said Trump initiated after inviting her to dinner and back to his hotel suite.
She said she did not feel physically or verbally threatened, though she knew his bodyguard was outside the suite, and there was what she perceived as an imbalance of power: Trump “was bigger and blocking the way”.
After it ended, she said, “It was really hard to get my shoes because my hands were shaking so hard.”
“He said, ‘Oh, it was great. Let’s get together again, honey bunch’,” Daniels continued.
“I just wanted to leave.”
In the years since the encounter was disclosed, Daniels has emerged as a vocal Trump antagonist, sharing her story in a book and on television and criticising the former president with mocking and pejorative jabs.
But there was no precedent for Tuesday’s events when she came face-to-face with Trump and was asked in an austere courtroom setting to describe her experiences before a jury weighing whether to convict a former American president of felony crimes for the first time in history.
Daniels told jurors that she met Trump because the adult film studio she worked for at the time was sponsoring one of the holes on the golf course.
They chatted about the adult film industry and her directing abilities when Trump’s group passed through.
The celebrity real estate developer remarked that she must be “the smart one” if she’s making films, Daniels recalled.
Later, in an area known as the “gift room”, where celebrity golfers collected gift bags and swag, Trump remembered her as “the smart one” and asked her if she wanted to go to dinner, Daniels said.
Daniels said she accepted Trump’s invitation because she wanted to get out of a planned dinner with her adult film company colleagues.
She said her then-publicist suggested in a phone call that Trump’s invitation was a good excuse to duck the work dinner and would “make a great story” and perhaps help her career.
“What could possibly go wrong?” she recalled the publicist saying.
She said the two saw each other periodically in the ensuing years when she said she spurned Trump’s advances.
She claimed that she learned from her agent in 2011, several years after she and Trump were last in touch, that the story had made its way to a magazine.
She said she agreed to an interview for 15,000 dollars because “I’d rather make the money than somebody make money off of me, and at least I could control the narrative”.
The story never ran, but later that year, she was alarmed when an item turned up on a website.
Perhaps seeking to pre-empt defence claims that she was in urgent need of a massive pay-out, Daniels said that she was in the best financial shape of her life, directing 10 films a year when she authorised her manager to shop her story during the 2016 presidential election cycle.
She said she had no intent of approaching Cohen or Trump to have them pay her for her story.
“My motivation wasn’t money,” she said. “It was to get the story out,” she said.
But Ms Necheles zeroed in on that point, pressing Daniels on the fact that she owes Trump hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees stemming from an unsuccessful defamation lawsuit and that she tweeted in 2022 that she “will go to jail before I pay a penny”.
“That was me saying, ‘I will not pay for telling the truth,’” Daniels said on Tuesday.
She later forcefully denied that she was trying to squeeze Trump for money.
“You were looking to extort money from President Trump,” Ms Necheles said.
“False,” Daniels responded.
“Well, that’s what you did,” the lawyer said.
“False,” Daniels answered.
Daniels was expected to return to the witness stand on Thursday when the trial resumes.
Evidence has made clear that at the time of the payment to Daniels on October 7 2016, Trump and his campaign were reeling from the publication of the never-before-seen 2005 Access Hollywood footage, in which he boasted about grabbing women’s genitals without their permission.
Trump spoke with Cohen and Hope Hicks, his campaign’s press secretary, by phone the next day as they sought to limit damage from the tape and keep his alleged affairs out of the press, according to evidence.
Before that video was made public, “there was very little, if any, interest” in her claims, according to evidence earlier in the trial from her then-lawyer, Keith Davidson.
A deal was reached with the National Enquirer for Daniels’ story, but the tabloid backed out.
Mr Davidson began negotiating with Cohen directly, hiked up the price to 130,000 dollars, and reached a deal.
After the deadline for the 130,000 dollar payment from Cohen came and went, Daniels authorised Mr Davidson to cancel the deal.
He did, by email, according to documents shown in court, but about two weeks later, the deal was revived.
Daniels testified that she ended up with about 96,000 dollars of the 130,000 dollar payment, after her lawyer and agent got their cuts.
She also said she was steadfast in abiding by her nondisclosure agreement with Cohen, declining to comment to The Wall Street Journal for a November 2016 story that reported she had been in discussions to tell her story on Good Morning America but that nothing had come of it.
She also declined when the newspaper asked her for comment before it broke the news of her hush money arrangement in 2018.
After that story was published, her life turned into “chaos”, she said.
“I was front and foremost everywhere,” she recalled.
Prosecutors are building toward their star witness, Cohen, who pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the hush money payments.
Trump is charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in connection with the hush money payments.
The trial is the first of his four criminal cases to reach a jury.
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