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A lawyer for Donald Trump continued to hammer away this morning at changing details over the years in Stormy Daniels’ accounts of a 2006 sexual encounter with Trump — and got plenty of pushback from the adult entertainer turned high-profile witness in Trump’s hush money trial.
During rapid fire, back-and-forth sparring that lasted almost three hours, Susan Necheles also said that Daniels — after collecting $130,000 for a non-disclosure agreement — eagerly sold her memoir, hawked merchandise, appeared on a reality TV show, sat for a documentary film, advertised herself as a spiritual medium, and toured as an adult dancer using her “supposed” sexual encounter with Trump as the hook.
Necheles estimated that Daniels had made $1 million or more from assorted ventures after becoming known for an adulterous sexual encounter with Trump, and she said Daniels’ once told a writer for Slate “you either wanted money or you were going to hurt him politically.”
Daniels shot back that she was just doing her job and paying off the “extraordinary” legal bills she had amassed by tangling with Trump. She testified that she “hated” the marketing for a U.S. tour of strip clubs, billed as “Make America Horny Again” — a play on Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan — although she did post the promotional posters to her Instagram.
Necheles pressed Daniels on discrepancies between past accounts and her testimony on Tuesday, including whether Trump personally invited her to dinner at his Lake Tahoe hotel suite in the summer 2006, whether they actually broke bread in the hotel suite, and whether Daniels felt too powerless to refuse sex with Trump that night.
Necheles said that Daniels has performed in or directed hundreds of pornographic films, yet testified on Tuesday that she felt “lightheaded” at the sight of Trump waiting in bed for her in his boxer shorts and a t-shirt.
Daniels replied that her reaction was to stepping out the bathroom and unexpectedly finding a man twice her age half undressed.
Necheles also questioned Daniels’ testimony about “an imbalance of power” between her and Trump in the moments before the sexual encounter. “You wrote that you had made him your bitch in your book,” Necheles said, referring to a passage of Daniels’ 2018 memoir, Full Disclosure, in which she described standing up to Trump during a lengthy conversation that preceded the sexual encounter.
“Ma’am,’” Necheles continued, “You claim ‘I made him my bitch’ but ‘I can’t say no to having sex with him?’”
A grand jury in Manhattan indicted the former U.S. president on March 30, 2023, charging that Trump conspired to influence the 2016 election by falsifying business records in order conceal reimbursing lawyer Michael Cohen for the $130,000 that Cohen paid to Daniels for her silence. Necheles pulled up a tweet from that day, in which Daniels wrote about drinking champagne and directed other tweeters to her merch site.
“And that was you shilling your merchandise, right?” Necheles demanded.
“That is me doing my job,” Daniels replied.
Later, on re-direct by Assistant District Attorney Susan Hoffinger, Daniels said she never testified before the grand jury.
“So you had nothing to do with the charges in this case?” Hoffinger asked, a query that drew a swift objection from Necheles — overruled by Judge Juan Merchan.
“I did not,” Daniels replied.
Asked by Hoffinger if the whole Trump experience was a “net positive or net negative in your life,” Daniels paused and said, “Negative.” Earlier, she said she has had to hire security, take extra precautions for her daughter, move twice, and pay attorneys fees connected to her attempt to break the non-disclosure agreement.
Hoffinger also sought to clarify testimony about Daniels’ tweets, noting that she was sometimes responding to hostile commenters. When Daniels posted that she would “dance down the street” when Trump is “selected” for prison, it was a reply to a Tweeter calling her “a disgusting degenerate prostitute” who “accepts money to Frame an innocent man,” meaning Trump, who the Tweeter predicted will be “selected by a landslide in 2024.”
Hoffinger also said that in Daniels’ failed lawsuit to get out of the non-disclosure agreement, Trump’s attorney, in court papers from June of 2018, confirmed that Trump had reimbursed Cohen.
Daniels left the stand after two days of testimony. She was followed by Rebecca Manochio, an accounting employee at the Trump Organization, who traced a records trail showing that Trump’s checks in 2017 — which prosecutors say included illegal reimbursements to Cohen — went first by FedEx to Trump’s bodyguard, Keith Schiller, at a home address in Washington, D.C., before being sent back with Trump’s signature.
Daniels, in her testimony, said that she met Schiller at the Lake Tahoe celebrity golf tournament in 2006 where the sexual encounter occurred, and that it was Schiller who extended the dinner invitation.
With Necheles accusing her of telling lies to make money, Daniels defended the truth of her account, saying that “if that story was untrue, I would have written it to be a lot better.”
