The star witness in the first criminal trial against Donald Trump took the floor in Manhattan court yesterday. Under the tycoon’s uncomfortable gaze, Stormy Daniels described in all kinds of detail the sexual encounter the two had at a resort on the shores of Lake Tahoe in 2006. Trump, who claims that the relationship never took place, to bribe the porn actress through her ex-lawyer Michael Cohen in 2016, in the middle of the election campaign, so that she would not speak publicly about it. And today he faces the first criminal trial against a former president in the history of the United States.
Trump is charged with 34 felonies related to that $130,000 payment, which he reimbursed to Cohen a year later and claimed as his company’s legal expenses. Specifically, he is accused of document falsification, aggravated because, according to the Prosecutor’s Office, he served in the commission of another crime against electoral campaign financing laws.
Called to testify by District Attorney Alvin Bragg, the actress – accustomed to the public eye in recent television interviews and podcasts – began by talking about her life journey, from childhood to starting in the porn industry at 23 years, first as an actress and then as a screenwriter and director. Then, the prosecution’s questions led her to her first interactions with Trump, a tycoon who at the turn of the century had already been a celebrity for two decades and whose television show, The Apprentice, was enjoying its peak popularity. .
In 2006 the two were photographed in a shop at the resort on the shores of Lake Tahoe in California. Trump was then 60 years old; Daniels. to a verdict and that could send the Republican nominee to prison before the November election.
Daniels described how Trump’s bodyguard Keith Schiller approached her to invite her to dinner with the mogul, an invitation she initially declined but accepted at the insistence of her publicist. When they finally met, Daniels recalled Trump meeting her in the resort suite wearing silk pajamas, which she asked to change into, to which the mogul agreed and changed into more formal clothes.
As Daniels spoke yesterday from the stand, Trump showed discomfort, sighing and whispering in the ear of the lawyer leading the defense, Todd Blanche. The judge presiding over the case, Juan Merchan, asked the actress to speak more slowly, then, since, due to nerves and the traumatic memory of the episode, she testified at an accelerated pace, according to the journalists who was in the room
With photographic memory, Daniels detailed the meeting with Trump. He asked her about the porn industry and working conditions, health insurance and, specifically, the competition for testing for sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). As Daniels specified, he wanted to make sure she didn’t have an STD to have sex with her without a condom. The tycoon told her that she reminded him of his daughter Ivanka: “She’s smart, blonde and beautiful, and people tend to underestimate her.”
During dinner, she asked him if he had a wife, and he told her not to worry, since Trump and Melania, who had married a year before, “we don’t even sleep in the same room.” She also described being taken aback by the tycoon’s airs of grandeur, who constantly interrupted her as she spoke, asking: “Are you always so rude? Are you always so arrogant and pompous? It seems you don’t even know how to hold a conversation.”
Daniels’ statements are not to the taste of a man obsessed with controlling the public image. The strategy of his defense is based on characterizing the actress as a woman who only wanted to take advantage of her fame to gain notoriety in the industry, an argument that Daniels tried to dismantle, first explaining that the relationship with Trump has cost some dismissal and, then, ensuring that the tycoon even offered him at that dinner to participate in The Apprentice in exchange for sex.
After dinner, Daniels went to the bathroom in the hotel suite and when she returned, she found the mogul waiting for her on the bed in shorts and a T-shirt. “What did I read wrong to get here?”, she asked herself, and added that she tried to leave, but he blocked her way, but not in a threatening way. Afterwards, he claimed he blacked out for a moment, although he hadn’t taken alcohol or drugs, which he hadn’t mentioned in any of his recent interviews. However, it is common for the version of a person traumatized by a sexual encounter – as she has described herself – to evolve over the years, a fact that could become relevant in this case.
Daniels answered with a resounding “yes” when asked by the prosecution if she had relations with Trump in that bed. He assured that he was not opposed to sex, but that he did not explicitly consent to it either, and stated that he did not enjoy the encounter because he felt an “imbalance” of power between the two.
When he began to describe in detail the sexual encounter and the positions they used, the defense objected and Judge Merchan overruled the objection. The magistrate warned prosecutors several times not to go into so much detail, but the vivid recollection of the encounter that Daniels expressed is part of the prosecution’s strategy to convince the jury that the sexual relationship took place and that , therefore, Trump’s bribery was intended to hide a true story in order to “adulterate” the election.
Daniels then explained that she met the mogul again in 2007, first at Trump Tower and then in Los Angeles. It was the last time she presumably agreed with him, and she assured that she never asked him to keep the relationship a secret. She first did it in 2016, she claimed, when Trump became the Republican nominee and she threatened to sell the story to the media.
