Adult star Stormy Daniels took the witness stand on Tuesday at Donald Trump's hush money trial, describing for jurors a sexual encounter the porn actor says she had with him in 2006 that resulted in her being paid off 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, later shaking his head and whispering to his lawyers as she testified.
Here are top revelations by Stormy Daniels against Donald Trump:
- Daniels testified that she ended up having sex with Trump on the bed of his hotel suite.
- Asked if Trump used a condom during the encounter, Daniels said, “No.” Daniels said the encounter was “brief” and when it ended she was shaking.
- Daniels testified that, after a while, she had to use the bathroom. When she was finished, she said, she found Trump sitting on the bed wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt. “When I exited, he was up on the bed, like this,” Daniels testified, feigning reclining with her knees up on the witness stand.
- “He said, ‘Oh it was great, let’s get together again honey bunch,’” Daniels continued. “I just wanted to leave.”
- Before they had sex, Daniels said Trump was between her and the door. She said she didn’t feel physically or verbally threatened, though she knew his bodyguard was outside the suite and there was what she perceived to be an imbalance of power: Trump “was bigger and blocking the way,” she testified. “The next thing I know was: I was on the bed,” Daniels recalled.
- Daniels said Trump’s bodyguard called her the next day to tell her that Trump wanted to see her again, and she agreed to meet him in a bar or club in her hotel. She said he would continue to think about the possibility of her appearing on one of his “Apprentice” shows, she told jurors. (Roethlisberger declined to comment on Daniels’ description of the evening in her 2018 book.)
- In January 2007, Daniels said she brought two friends to a vodka release party sponsored by Trump in Los Angeles. Inside a VIP booth, Daniels said she was introduced to another of Trump’s friends — a woman she later learned was Karen McDougal, a Playboy model who has said she had an affair with Trump. The former president also denies this claim.
- Daniels testified that she last saw Trump in June 2007 at his bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She recalled spending about two hours there — highlighted by Trump’s fascination with the Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week,” which was on the TV, and little news about her chances of appearing on “The Apprentice.” Daniels testified that she spurned Trump’s advances and that he told her, “I miss you,” and wanted to get together again.
- Asked if Trump ever told her to keep things between them confidential, she testified: “Absolutely not.” Daniels said she spoke with Trump several more times by phone and that he eventually told her he wouldn’t be able to put her on “The Apprentice.” She testified that Trump told her “someone high up’s wife overruled” the idea. In her 2018 book, “Full Disclosure,” Daniels wrote that Trump had told her that actress Roma Downey — the wife of show producer Mark Burnett — had objected to her being on the program.
- Daniels testified that a few years after “The Apprentice” possibly died and she had stopped talking with Trump, she learned from her agent in 2011 that the story had made its way to a magazine. She said she agreed to an interview for $15,000 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. In the interim, she said, she’d been threatened to keep silent by a stranger in a Las Vegas parking lot.
(With inputs from agency)
Also Read: Stormy Daniels testifies in hush money trial against former US President Donald Trump
