The woman who walked into Donald Trump’s Manhattan courtroom today was a sharp departure from many of the week’s earlier witnesses, who testified on such procedural topics as ledgers, invoices and common accounting practices.
This witness, Stormy Daniels, a former porn star, instead offered a vivid, unsavory and sometimes uneven account of something that has made her far more famous than her adult film career: a 2006 sexual encounter she said she had with Trump that lies at the heart of the criminal case he faces in Manhattan.
Daniels, dressed in all black, wearing glasses and her long blonde hair pulled back, was a complicated and imperfect witness, who was scolded by the judge, Juan Merchan, for wandering off topic.
Prosecutors, too, seemed sometimes frustrated by both the quicksilver pace of her answers — she is a fast talker, with little filter — and the consistent objections by the defense, many of which Merchan upheld. He appeared to want to avoid graphic testimony, meandering answers and leading questions.
Still, Daniels, 45, gave the jury — and assembled members of the press and public — a lurid portrait of her interactions with Trump, who she said invited her to a Lake Tahoe hotel suite and suggested she might appear on the “Apprentice.” Then, after she went to the bathroom, she found him in his boxers and T-shirt and posed on the bed, waiting, she said.
“The room spun in slow motion,” Daniels said on the stand, adding, “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, what did I misread to get here?’”
Daniels said the sexual encounter that followed was consensual but traumatizing, describing herself as bewildered and shaking afterward. She hadn’t said no, she recalled, “because I didn’t say anything at all.”
A payment of $130,000 to Daniels forms the backbone of the case brought by the Manhattan district attorney: Prosecutors contend that Trump falsified 34 business records to cover up a reimbursement to his onetime lawyer, Michael Cohen, who paid off Daniels to keep her story to herself shortly before the 2016 election.
Cohen — a felon — is expected to testify later this month and is also considered a problematic witness. He has been repeatedly denigrated during the trial, now in its fourth week.
Trump has denied the sexual encounter with Daniels, and the charges.
A portrait of Trump emerges
Despite the scuff marks on Daniels and Cohen, the portrait being painted of Trump is unflattering: a man obsessed with his own image, and fond of much younger women, including Daniels, who is 33 years his junior. (She said she told him in the hotel suite in Lake Tahoe, when she was 27 and he was 60, that he was “pompous” and “arrogant.”)
After they met in Tahoe, Trump called Daniels repeatedly, she testified, and said he wanted to see her again. He called her “Honeybunch” and said she reminded him of his daughter, presumably Ivanka. (“She’s smart and blonde and beautiful and people underestimate her as well,” Daniels recalled Trump said.)
Shedding more light on Trump’s psyche, an earlier witness, Sally Franklin, an employee with Penguin Random House, read a series of statements from Trump’s own books, including ones expressing his attitude toward revenge.
“For many years, I have said that if someone screws you, screw them back,” Trump wrote, adding, “Like it says in the Bible, an eye for an eye.” Another book passage suggested “all the women on ‘The Apprentice’ flirted with me.”
‘Better left unsaid’
It wasn’t an easy day for Merchan, who seemed bothered by Daniels’s tendency for tangents. His voice grew sharp at several moments, and he called a series of sidebars after defense objections. After lunch, Merchan — after denying a request for a mistrial — said he believed Daniels, as a witness, “was a little difficult to control.”
“There were some things that would have been better left unsaid,” the judge said, adding “I was surprised that there were not more objections” by the defense.
In moving for a mistrial, Todd Blanche, a defense attorney, complained that the prosecution had elicited a series of negative stories about Trump that had little bearing on the case.
“There’s no way to un-ring the bell,” Blanche said, saying that Daniels’s testimony that Trump didn’t wear a condom during their encounter, for instance, was deeply prejudicial.
“This has nothing to do with this case,” he added, saying the intention was “pure embarrassment” to the former president, and “to inflame this jury.”
During cross-examination, which will continue on Thursday when court resumes, another defense lawyer, Susan Necheles, was blistering in her questioning from the jump. She tried to get Daniels to admit a lie when she said she hadn’t rehearsed her testimony but had participated in a mock cross-examination with prosecutors.
Necheles soon got even more direct, asking Daniels if she hated Trump.
Daniels didn’t pause. “Yes,” she said.
Necheles continued: “And you want him to go to jail?”
Daniels parried: “I want him to be held accountable.”
Necheles suggested that Daniels was only motivated by desire for financial gain in recounting her story of what happened in Lake Tahoe. “That story has made you a lot of money, right?” she said.
“It has also cost me a lot of money,” Daniels shot back.
The jury’s opinion of this sensational testimony is impossible to know; they were mostly expressionless, even during its most salacious portions. Trump himself seemed glum and bothered by Daniels’s testimony, but only to a point: During some of the most combative moments, he sat — as he often does — with his eyes closed.
As for Daniels, she seemed unfazed talking about sex, though her voice did quiver when she sought to explain why she had pursued a hush-money deal, saying she wasn’t after money and wanted the story of her experience with Trump to be made public.
But in her sharp-elbowed cross-examination, Necheles pushed back, suggesting that negotiations before Election Day 2016 — and the eventual $130,000 deal with Cohen, which buried the story — suggested that Daniels had other motivations.
And finally, as the clock ticked down on an extraordinary day, Daniels offered a concession of sorts, saying she wanted to “get the story out.”
“And,” she added, “make some money.”
Here’s the team we have reporting on the trial. During the proceedings, we’ll be sending you updates more frequently, including breaking news alerts and our weekly analysis on Thursdays.
Your questions
We’re asking readers what they’d like to know about the Trump cases: the charges, the procedure, the important players or anything else. You can send us your question by filling out this form.
If Trump is sleeping in court, why does the judge allow it? Isn’t sleeping in court disrespectful and showing disdain? — John Krerowicz, Kenosha, Wis.
Jesse: There is no rule against sleeping in the courtroom, though the optics of a defendant snoozing during testimony may be bad. For his part, Trump has denied slumbering, saying instead that he’s simply resting his “beautiful blue eyes” and listening “intensely.” The judge has not said anything about it thus far, though time will tell if the jury has an opinion.
What else to watch
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We’re keeping our eyes on a new dispute simmering in the classified documents case involving allegations by Trump’s lawyers that prosecutors failed to preserve the integrity of the boxes of documents at the heart of the case. Judge Aileen Cannon has not yet decided how she plans to handle the accusations.
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After hearing arguments on April 25 about Trump’s claim of immunity in the Jan. 6 case, the Supreme Court could issue a ruling in late June or early July.
Where does each criminal case stand?
Trump is at the center of at least four separate criminal investigations, at both the state and federal levels, into matters related to his business and political careers. Here is where each case stands.
