When Donald J. Trump met Stormy Daniels, their flirtation appeared fleeting: He was a 60-year-old married mogul on the peak of actuality tv fame, and she or he was 27, not half his age, a Louisiana native raised in poverty and headed to porn-film stardom.
However that probability encounter in Lake Tahoe, Nev., some twenty years in the past set off a sequence of occasions that has introduced the nation the primary legal trial of an American president.
And on Tuesday, Ms. Daniels took the stand at that trial, bringing the previous president head to head with the porn star on the case’s middle.
The fees stem from her story of intercourse with Mr. Trump throughout that 2006 movie star golf match in Lake Tahoe, a narrative she was purchasing a decade later, within the closing days of the presidential marketing campaign. Mr. Trump’s longtime lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, paid her $130,000 in hush cash earlier than Election Day, and the previous president is accused of falsifying enterprise information to cowl up reimbursements for Mr. Cohen.
Ms. Daniels’s fast-paced testimony lasted practically 5 hours, throughout which she described an encounter with Mr. Trump, now 77, that he has lengthy denied. Stress gripped the courtroom, her garrulous testimony filling a heavy silence. She made jokes; they didn’t land.
After a few half-hour on the stand, she started to unspool intimate particulars about Mr. Trump, a lot in order that the choose balked at a number of the testimony. He implied it was gratuitously vulgar, and the protection sought a mistrial.
Ms. Daniels mentioned the longer term president had invited her to dinner inside his palatial Lake Tahoe lodge suite. He answered the door sporting silk pajamas. When he was impolite, she playfully spanked him with a rolled-up journal. And when she requested about his spouse, he advised her to not fear, that they didn’t even sleep in the identical room — prompting Mr. Trump to shake his head in disgust and mutter “bullshit” to his attorneys, loud sufficient that it drew a non-public rebuke from the choose, who referred to as it “contemptuous.”
Ms. Daniels then recounted the intercourse itself in graphic element. It occurred, she mentioned, after she returned from the lavatory and located Mr. Trump in his boxer shorts and T-shirt. She tried to depart and he blocked her path, although not, she mentioned, in a threatening method. The intercourse was temporary, she mentioned, and though she by no means mentioned no, there was a “energy imbalance.”
“I used to be staring up on the ceiling, questioning how I bought there,” she advised the jury, including that Mr. Trump didn’t put on a condom.
The testimony was an astonishing second in American political historical past and a crowning spectacle in a trial stuffed with them: a porn star, throughout from a former and probably future president, telling the world what she was as soon as paid to maintain quiet about.
Ms. Daniels, 45, has advised her story broadly — to prosecutors, reporters, her associates, in a ebook — however by no means to jurors, and never with Mr. Trump within the room. Her look on the stand appeared to unnerve Mr. Trump as she aired his soiled laundry, beneath oath, in mortifying element.
However Ms. Daniels’s story is not only a sordid kiss-and-tell story; it spotlights what prosecutors say was Mr. Trump’s criminality. He’s accused of engineering the false enterprise information scheme to cowl up all traces of their tryst: the hush cash, the reimbursement to Mr. Cohen and, sure, the intercourse.
Whereas the protection solid the testimony as a smear, Ms. Daniels offered prosecutors with some helpful particulars. She established the basic story of her encounter with Mr. Trump. And she or he testified that she would have advised the identical uncomfortable story in 2016, had she not taken the hush cash from Mr. Trump’s fixer.
However her testimony, at instances, appeared problematic for the prosecutors who had referred to as her. Ms. Daniels testified that cash was not her motivation, and that she needed to get her story out. That might draw skepticism from jurors, who’ve heard that she accepted the $130,000 and, in change, didn’t inform her story for greater than a yr.
“My motivation wasn’t cash,” she mentioned. “It was motivated out of worry, not cash.”
The jury additionally noticed the choose, Juan M. Merchan, scold Ms. Daniels at the least twice, instructing her to stay to the questions requested of her. At one level, he even issued his personal objection, interrupting her testimony as she started to explain the sexual place she and Mr. Trump assumed.
Justice Merchan, usually a stoic presence with a good grip over his courtroom, confirmed uncommon exasperation because the testimony veered in a scurrilous route and the trial took on a circuslike environment.
He additionally requested Ms. Daniels to decelerate. She was a rapid-fire talker, vulnerable to laughter and prolonged asides.
Exterior the jury’s presence, the choose acknowledged that “there have been some issues higher left unsaid” in her testimony and recommended that Ms. Daniels may need “credibility points.”
But he rejected the protection’s bid for a mistrial, as an alternative inviting Mr. Trump’s attorneys to mount an aggressive questioning of Ms. Daniels.
“The extra instances this story has modified, the extra fodder for cross-examination,” he mentioned.
Susan Necheles, the Trump lawyer who led the cross-examination, heeded the choose’s recommendation.
She painted Ms. Daniels as a mendacity opportunist. She unearthed excerpts from Ms. Daniels’s ebook to recommend that her story had modified over time. And in a probably troublesome second for Ms. Daniels, Ms. Necheles implied that she had fabricated an account of a Trump supporter threatening her and her daughter in a Las Vegas parking zone, a narrative she didn’t share together with her child’s father.
“Your daughter’s life was in jeopardy and also you didn’t inform her father, proper?” Ms. Necheles requested, the implication being that the story was phony.
Ms. Daniels was indignant. And through some cross-examination, she parried successfully, performing even higher than she did together with her solutions to prosecutors.
Her testimony introduced full circle one of many earliest scandals that loomed over Mr. Trump’s presidency. Ever since The Wall Avenue Journal broke the information six years in the past that Mr. Cohen had paid her to maintain quiet, her story has modified the course of American politics and laid the groundwork for the case.
Over time, Ms. Daniels has leaned into her Trump-adjacent fame. She has offered merchandise, filmed a documentary, sat for high-profile interviews and written a ebook that was so tell-all it included detailed descriptions of the previous president’s genitalia. Mr. Trump has additionally dished out insults that ridiculed her look, calling her “horseface.”
However at different instances, Ms. Daniels appeared tortured, detailing the private toll of outsize publicity. All of the sudden, she was not only a porn star however a risk to a person who instructions essentially the most fervent political motion in fashionable American historical past. She advised reporters she was inundated by threats from Trump supporters, a lot of which have been graphic. She feared for her household and has divorced her third husband, the daddy of her daughter.
“I’ve been simply tormented for the final 5 years or so,” she mentioned within the opening scene of “Stormy,” a documentary about her life that was launched on Peacock. “And right here I’m, I’m nonetheless right here.”
Ms. Daniels joined the trial at a pivotal second. On Monday, prosecutors had requested two veterans of the Trump Group’s accounting division to point out jurors the 34 information they are saying Mr. Trump falsified to hide his reimbursement of Mr. Cohen for the hush cash. These embrace 11 invoices, 11 checks and 12 entries in Mr. Trump’s ledger that portrayed the funds as regular authorized bills.
Within the weeks forward, Mr. Cohen is predicted to take the stand and join the dots between the salacious particulars and the substantive paperwork. On Tuesday, Ms. Daniels’s testimony took jurors by way of the smuttier parts of the case.
She started by recounting a tough childhood in Baton Rouge. Her dad and mom break up up when she was younger, she mentioned.
She needed to be a veterinarian, and was editor of her highschool newspaper. Ultimately, she started stripping, she says, as a result of she earned greater than she did shoveling manure at a horse steady.
By the point she met Mr. Trump on the golf match in 2006, she was a participant in porn. She was an actress, and would finally discover her footing as a director and producer.
Requested to establish Mr. Trump within the courtroom, she referred to as him out as the person in a navy go well with jacket. Ms. Daniels, wearing all black and sporting glasses, lowered the singular former president to only one other man within the courtroom.
She spent a lot of her testimony describing that first encounter in Lake Tahoe. When she met Mr. Trump, she knew he was a golfer and the host of the “The Apprentice,” the truth present that revived Mr. Trump’s movie star for a brand new technology. In a memorable line, Ms. Daniels mentioned she additionally knew that he was “as previous or older than my father.”
Later that day, she mentioned, Mr. Trump’s aide approached and invited her to dinner. She says he took her quantity, however that her preliminary response was “eff no,” abbreviating an expletive.
However her publicist inspired her: “What might presumably go mistaken?”
She then transported jurors inside his lodge room, portray the sprawling suite in minute element, capturing each side all the way down to the colour of the tiles.
She mentioned Mr. Trump had taken an curiosity in her enterprise and requested about unions, residuals and medical insurance, in addition to about testing for sexually transmitted ailments. “He was very curious about how I segued from turning into only a porn star to writing and directing,” she mentioned.
Ms. Daniels mentioned Mr. Trump advised her, “You remind me of my daughter. She is wise and blond and exquisite, and other people underestimate her as nicely.”
She recalled going into the lavatory to do her lipstick, the place, she mentioned, she seen gold tweezers and Outdated Spice.
Later, they stayed in contact, she mentioned. In 2007, they met at Trump Tower in New York, at a Trump Vodka launch celebration in Los Angeles and at a Beverly Hills lodge — all interactions that appeared to undercut Mr. Trump’s claims that he barely knew her.
The jury was additionally proven contact logs from Ms. Daniels’s telephone and from Mr. Trump’s assistant’s telephone exhibiting that they remained in contact. And after they did speak, she mentioned, Mr. Trump had a nickname for her: “honeybunch.”
They’ve solely spoken by way of attorneys since then, most notably in the course of the hush-money negotiations. When Ms. Necheles accused Ms. Daniels of utilizing that effort to “extort cash from President Trump,” Ms. Daniels objected.
“False,” she mentioned.
“That’s what you probably did, proper?” Ms. Necheles continued.
“False!” Ms. Daniels shouted.
Reporting was contributed by William Okay. Rashbaum, Kate Christobek, Jesse McKinley, Wesley Parnell and Matthew Haag.
