Donald J. Trump, the onetime president, and Stormy Daniels, the longtime porn star, despise each other. However when Ms. Daniels returned to the witness stand at Mr. Trump’s felony trial on Thursday, his legal professionals made them sound so much alike.
He wrote greater than a dozen self-aggrandizing books; she wrote a tell-all memoir. He mocked her look on social media; she fired again with a scatological insult. He peddled a $59.99 Bible; she hawked a $40 “Stormy, saint of indictments” candle, that carried her picture draped in a Christ-like gown.
Throughout Thursday’s grueling cross-examination, Mr. Trump’s legal professionals sought to discredit Ms. Daniels as a money-grubbing extortionist who used a passing proximity to Mr. Trump to realize fame and riches. However the extra the protection assailed her self-promoting merchandise and on-line screeds, the extra Ms. Daniels resembled the person she was testifying in opposition to: a grasp of promoting, a savant of social-media scorn.
“Not not like Mr. Trump,” she stated on the stand, although not like him, she did it with out the facility and platform of the presidency.
Ms. Daniels’s look plunged the continuing into turmoil because the protection pleaded with the decide to declare a mistrial within the first felony trial of an American president. Ms. Daniels’s graphic account of a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump, they argued, had inflicted irreparable injury on the protection.
However the decide, Juan M. Merchan, rejected the request and rebuked protection legal professionals, noting that their determination to disclaim that the tryst had even occurred had opened the door for a lot of her express testimony. Ms. Daniels supplied jurors a first-person account of the encounter with Mr. Trump, serving to prosecutors bolster perception in an incident that underpins the case.
Her look additionally laid the groundwork for the prosecution’s star witness, Michael D. Cohen, who is predicted to take the stand Monday, in accordance with individuals with information of the matter. Mr. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former fixer, purchased Ms. Daniels’s silence within the closing stretch of the 2016 presidential marketing campaign, the payoff that led to the costs in opposition to Mr. Trump, who’s accused of falsifying information to cowl up the scandal.
Over practically eight hours of searing testimony throughout two days, Ms. Daniels recounted her story of a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump in 2006. She described accepting the $130,000 hush-money fee throughout his first presidential marketing campaign. And, dealing with combative questions from his legal professionals about refined shifts in her story, she swung between defiance and vulnerability.
After a shaky efficiency on the stand earlier within the week, Ms. Daniels on Thursday conceded nearly nothing. She had been frazzled. Now she was nimble as she volleyed along with her questioner.
Susan Necheles, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, grilled Ms. Daniels about her account of a one-night stand at a celeb golf match in Nevada: “You made all this up, proper?”
Ms. Daniels responded with a forceful “no.”
When Ms. Necheles instructed that the porn star had expertise with “phony tales about intercourse,” Ms. Daniels responded that the intercourse in her movies was “very a lot actual, identical to what occurred to me in that room.” And when Ms. Necheles implied that her expertise producing movies confirmed that she knew tips on how to spin fiction, Ms. Daniels replied, “I might have written it to be so much higher.”
Ms. Daniels, carrying a darkish inexperienced gown and an extended black cardigan, confirmed sensitivity at odds with the protection’s gold-digging portrayal. When a prosecutor requested her a closing query — whether or not her expertise talking out about Mr. Trump had been optimistic or damaging — she choked up.
“Detrimental,” Daniels stated, barely getting the phrase out, seemingly on the verge of tears.
Mr. Trump’s legal professionals conveyed incredulity, noting that Ms. Daniels had denied the fling at varied factors. They unearthed inconsistencies, most notably Ms. Daniels’s insistence that she had wished her story out on the earth and had little curiosity in cash. Ms. Necheles, spotlighting Ms. Daniels’s effort to promote the story to the media in addition to to Mr. Trump, instructed that the truth is Ms. Daniels had shaken him down.
“That’s what you had been asking in 2016, was for cash, to have the ability to inform your story?” Ms. Necheles requested pointedly, including, “That was your alternative, proper?”
Ms. Daniels resisted, saying she “accepted a suggestion” from Mr. Cohen within the waning days of the 2016 marketing campaign as a result of she was “operating out of time.”
However Ms. Necheles famous that she might have instructed her story totally free. She pointed to proof that Ms. Daniels had flirted with doing so however had deserted discussions with a reporter from Slate journal.
“You may have gone out any day of the week” and given a information convention, Ms. Necheles stated, “however you selected to not, proper?”
The protection chipped at Ms. Daniels’s credibility after she spent a lot of her earlier testimony describing an encounter with Mr. Trump in a sprawling Lake Tahoe, Nev., resort suite in 2006.
In lurid element — a lot in order that the decide scolded her Tuesday — Ms. Daniels painted the scene. She instructed jurors about Mr. Trump’s underwear, the sexual place they assumed and his flirtatious chitchat likening her to his daughter: “She is wise and blond and exquisite, and folks underestimate her as nicely.”
However the testimony, whereas hanging, was one thing of a sideshow to the trial’s fundamental occasion. There may be nothing unlawful a few married man having intercourse with a porn star, neither is it inherently felony to pay an individual for silence.
And Ms. Daniels knew nothing in regards to the information that, in accordance with prosecutors, Mr. Trump falsified to hide his compensation of Mr. Cohen for the $130,000 hush-money deal.
Citing her distance from the information, Mr. Trump’s legal professionals sought a mistrial for the second time this week, arguing Ms. Daniels’s testimony was irrelevant and prejudicial. “It nearly defies perception that we’re right here a few information case,” his lead lawyer, Todd Blanche, argued. The protection additionally requested to change a gag order to let Mr. Trump dispute Ms. Daniels’s testimony.
Justice Merchan denied each requests, and chided Mr. Trump’s legal professionals for missteps through the prosecution’s examination of Ms. Daniels, saying they didn’t object usually sufficient. He additionally instructed that the previous president’s personal insistence on denying any sexual encounter with Ms. Daniels had allowed the prosecution to introduce proof that it did the truth is happen.
“That, in my thoughts, permits the individuals to do what they’ll to rehabilitate her and to corroborate her story,” he stated.
After Ms. Daniels left the stand, prosecutors referred to as witnesses extra immediately associated to the information. They questioned Rebecca Manochio, a junior bookkeeper on the Trump Group, who described mailing Mr. Cohen’s checks, his reimbursements for funds to Ms. Daniels, to Washington for Mr. Trump to signal throughout his presidency.
In addition they referred to as Madeleine Westerhout, one in all Mr. Trump’s most trusted aides within the early White Home years. She sat at a desk proper exterior the Oval Workplace and coordinated lots of his communications, together with a vital assembly with Mr. Cohen simply weeks into his time period.
Mr. Cohen is predicted to testify that they mentioned the plan to falsify the information — recording the funds as bizarre “authorized bills” — and Ms. Westerhout confirmed the assembly was scheduled.
She additionally confirmed that Mr. Trump paid shut consideration to checks he signed within the White Home.
That testimony, considerably anticlimactic after two days of a porn star’s tales of intercourse and scandal, might nonetheless corroborate elements of Mr. Cohen’s story. And in the end, the decision might grasp on his phrases — in addition to the query of whether or not the jurors blame the prosecution or Mr. Trump for subjecting them to hours of squirm-inducing testimony.
For many of Thursday, Ms. Daniels appeared calm and managed as she quibbled over essentially the most trivial of details. She by no means broke down, even when Ms. Necheles, with a hostile tone, accused her of capitalizing on her brush with Mr. Trump’s fame.
When Ms. Necheles displayed on the courtroom screens an commercial for her strip membership tour entitled “Make America Sexy Once more,” Ms. Daniels stated that she had hated that tagline.
When the protection performed a recording of Ms. Daniels’s lawyer telling Mr. Cohen that she was determined for cash, Ms. Daniels denied saying something of that nature.
And when Ms. Necheles accused Ms. Daniels of extortion, remarking “You had been threatening to attempt to damage” Trump “if he didn’t offer you cash,” the witness returned to one in all her widespread refrains of the week: “False.”
Ms. Daniels stated that after paying bills, together with authorized charges, she netted lower than $100,000 from the hush cash. And regardless of her huge array of on-line merchandise — together with T-shirts and comedian books, some aimed on the anti-Trump resistance — she stated she had but to show a revenue.
“It covers my journey and my bills and my safety,” she defined as Mr. Trump leaned ahead and stared on the display that displayed the displays of her entrepreneurial efforts.
Ms. Daniels famous that she was hardly distinctive. Mr. Trump is himself a branding virtuoso and an evangelist for unbridled capitalism. He as soon as wrote a guide referred to as “Methods to Get Wealthy.”
And confronted along with her schoolyard insults aimed on the former president, she once more solid him because the instigator.
He had belittled her look, calling her “horseface.” She mocked him as an “orange turd.”
“I’m not a human bathroom,” she stated Thursday, “so in the event that they wish to make enjoyable of me, I could make enjoyable of them.”
Jonathan Swan, Matthew Haag, Kate Christobek and Wesley Parnell contributed reporting.
