(Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images)
Stormy Daniels testified this morning for the prosecution in Donald Trump’s false business records case.
The day began with Trump posting and then deleting that he had “just recently been told who the witness is today,” followed by one last, desperate push to exclude Daniels’s testimony. His attorney Susan Necheles argued that a description of their brief sexual liaison “isn’t needed in this case,” which is about “books and records.” Assistant DA Susan Hoffinger countered that it was important to get the circumstances of the encounter and Daniels’s feelings about it on the record.
“It’s not going to involve any descriptions of genitalia or anything of that nature,” she promised.
Justice Juan Merchan warned the prosecution to avoid soliciting incendiary and salacious statements from the witness. But it was clear from the first minutes that neither the defense’s strenuous objections, nor the court’s imprecations, were going to keep Stormy Daniels in PG-mode while discussing sex with the former president.
The adult film star recounted meeting Trump at a golf tournament in 2006 where the film company Wicked Pictures was sponsoring a hole — a joke she leaned into on the witness stand. Trump invited her to dinner and answered the door to his suite clad in silk pajamas. After she teased him about his Hugh Hefner attire, he got dressed and interrogated her over their meal about the porn business.
Daniels testified that Trump’s only mention of his wife Melania was to say that they had separate bedrooms — something which appeared to strike a nerve with the defendant. And indeed, he never cared enough to ask her to hide their encounter from Melania or anyone else until he became a presidential candidate.
As Lawfare’s Quinta Jurecic has observed in The Atlantic, the sexual encounter, such as it was, is likely to be perceived differently by men and women.
According to Daniels, Trump dangled the possibility of being on “The Apprentice,” so that she could show the world she wasn’t just a “bimbo.” After dinner, she went to the bathroom, and returned to find Trump seated on the bed in his underwear.
Whether you perceive it as coercive for a physically and economically stronger man to promise professional rewards and demand sex as the price of “getting out of the trailer park,” even as his bodyguard stands outside the door, is likely a function of the body you live in.
The New York Times reporters liveblogging from inside the courtroom appear to think that Daniels risks engendering sympathy for Trump and is likely to be confronted on cross examination with the evolution of her story since 2018, when she took a decidedly more lighthearted tone. Daniels also testified that she didn’t care how much she got paid, something belied by her own messages with her manager as they haggled over the final sum. But in six years, she’s never once said that it occurred to her that she was allowed to say “no,” or even to ask that he wear a condom. (He didn’t.)
After lunch, before the jury returned, Trump’s lawyers moved for a mistrial based on Daniels’s “prejudicial” testimony. While agreeing that it would have been better to have more “guardrails” in place, he noted that the defense would have an opportunity to question Daniels about her evolving narrative on cross examination.
But if the point of putting Daniels on the stand was to establish that having her story out there in 2016 would have been disastrous for Trump’s presidential campaign, giving him every incentive to pay her to keep quiet, well … mission accomplished there.
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.
