Day 13: Stormy on the Stand

A full account of her dark, believable and entertaining testimony

Day 12 was about invoices and ledgers, and Day 13 involved condoms and the creepy man in a parking lot.

Monday was more important for the urgent task of convicting Donald Trump, but Tuesday was a day that, if Trump is found guilty, will take its tawdry place in the history of great American trials.

I’m sorry this is a few days late but honestly, I want to get it right for history.

During the lunch break, a court official told me that the video feed available in the courtroom— and visible to reporters and a few spectators in “the overflow room” — is on closed-circuit TV. He said there is absolutely no photographic record of the trial other than the “photo spray” of Trump sitting alone and posing for pool photographers for 30 seconds. There is no court-approved audio or videotape to release to historians even decades from now. No one but the participants and a fewer than 100 reporters and spectators will ever see images of a former president of the United States on trial. History will have to absorb it old-style, through court transcripts, our accounts, and the superb work of the half dozen courtroom artists who are here.

Remember that television shot of O.J. Simpson reacting to the not-guilty verdict? Neither we nor our descendants will ever see such an image in this case, whichever way it goes.

That’s a bit of a problem for show business because the transcripts and eyewitness accounts of people like me cannot do justice to the entertainment value of Daniels’ testimony. Actresses playing Stormy —starting this weekend on Saturday Night Live and likely continuing in a Ryan Murphy TV series — won’t know exactly how she came across on the stand.

Even those of us inside the courtroom are uncertain of her impact on the case. Will jurors connect her story to the D.A.’s narrative and find her testimony believable and relevant to their assessment of Trump’s motive for paying her off just before the election? Will they disregard almost all of it in favor of examining the facts surrounding the basic charge, which is “the falsification of business records”? Even those of us who spend a good chunk of the day peering at jurors don’t have a frickin’ clue.

We do know that millions of Americans will vote for Trump no matter what he did with women, as millions of liberal voters did in the cases of Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton. 

***

The day began with a motion offered by Susan Necheles, a slight but tough-looking defense attorney with a rep in the New York bar for “pulling rabbits out of hats,” though she couldn’t do so in the 1990s for the late Genovese crime family underboss Venero (“Benny Eggs”) Mangano, who was convicted.

Necheles wants to get her latter-day “Benny Eggs” off. To do so, it would help if jurors never heard Stormy Daniels’ full story. She argued to Judge Juan Merchan that any talk of sex in Daniels’s testimony would be “unduly prejudicial” to her current client.

The judge was concerned all day about prejudicial testimony, and he asked prosecutor Susan Hoffinger how much detail she needed. Hoffinger—the dark-haired, matter-of-fact chief investigator of the D.A.’s Office— agreed that “certain details are too salacious” but stressed that a full explanation of the conversation between Daniels and Trump in the hotel penthouse was essential.

As for the sex act, Hoffinger promised that it would be “very basic without any descriptions of genitalia.”

Necheles insisted there was no need to bring up sex at all because “this case is about records.” If so, the defense may have lost it on Monday when two Trump Organization accountants confirmed the records’ accuracy.

The judge ruled that he would allow Daniels’ testimony about the sexual encounter because she “has credibility issues” that she should be permitted to address. But he added: “We don’t need to know details about intercourse.”

The first witness of the day was Sally Franklin, an editor at Penguin Random House called to validate exhibits that the Manhattan District Attorney’s office D.A. believes are incriminating, namely two of the books Trump wrote about himself.

The books are Trump: How to Get Rich and Trump: Think Like a Billionaire. After establishing that the use of a ghostwriter did not lessen Trump’s responsibility for his words, the prosecution asked the publishing executive to read some of them. 

In print, Trump explained that you must pay attention to details “down to the paperclips.” He advised, “When you’re working with a decorator, make sure you see all of the invoices…When you sign a check yourself, you’re seeing what’s going on in your business.” He added that, “Even in high-end shops, I bargain,” often offering $2,000 for a $10,000 item.

In a chapter of How to Think Like a Billionaire entitled “How to Pinch Pennies,” Trump recounted how his editor, Jonathan Karp, ribbed him for being so tight that he used space heaters in Trump Tower. And he recounted how Spy Magazine, a hilarious 1980s publication, famously sent him a check for 50 cents to see if he’d deposit it, and sure enough, he did. He didn’t mention that Spy had done this to show the greed of “the short-fingered vulgarian.”

We’ll likely learn in the prosecutors’ closing argument that they introduced these exhibits to establish and build on evidence of Trump trying to stiff Daniels. And it helps establish that despite being president, Trump knew exactly what the checks he signed were for — and that “grossing up” the money he paid Cohen as part of the coverup was out of character for the cheap bastard.   

Those weren’t the only ways that Trump was hoisted in court on his own petard. He wrote that sometimes you have to “screw people,” and instructed that, “When someone hurts you, go after them as viciously and violently as you can.” This cuts against the defense’s argument that he was merely the victim of an extortion scheme.

The D.A. also used Trump’s own words to pre-corroborate Daniels’ testimony about his sense of sexual entitlement. “All the women on The Apprentice flirted with me, consciously or unconsciously,” he wrote, because he possessed “a sexual presence.” More like sexual entitlement, as we soon learn.

Just after 10:30 a.m., a medium-sized buxom woman, clad in black palazzo pants, a black tunic, and a black hoodie, walked with purpose into the courtroom, her sensible glasses propped on her head. She looked like a Texas mother and small business owner on her way to the funeral of a much older man she despised. At least, she hoped it was his funeral. 

As she settled into the chair, I focused on… the hair. This constitutes observatory growth for me. I’m normally so oblivious to hair that I was the last to learn how often Hillary Clinton changed her look. But after my success in closely examining Trump’s bald scalp, I now used my binoculars to determine that Stormy Daniels wears her hair — blond in front and dark brown in the back — with the kind of informal hair clip a female reporter next to me said was what a woman would wear to the gym.

Daniels, who is 45, looked to me a bit like a younger, hipper, more performative Claire McCaskill if she had chosen strip clubs over the Senate. I shudder to think that historians will have to rely on me for this word picture so maybe I should leave it at: formidable and fun.  

Later, I noticed that Daniels, who doesn’t seem to have had a lot of face work, wore plenty of eye makeup but not long lashes and bore a tattoo that I couldn’t identify on her right forearm. On the stand, she came across as a smart and ambitious woman, accomplished in her field, whatever one thinks of it, who has a point that she is eager to convey. The point is her dark and ultimately credible story, told with verve and conviction, despite a few holes.

At the outset, the witness said she preferred to be called Stormy Daniels, not by her real name, Stephanie Clifford. She grew up in Baton Rouge, where her parents split up when she was four-years-old. She attended a ”very Christian, very strict elementary school,” took part in 4-H, and wanted to be a veterinarian. She said she was an editor of her high school newspaper, danced in a Baton Rouge ballet company, and graduated in the top 10ten percent of her class, adding that she received a full scholarship in veterinarian medicine from Texas A&M but, still needing money, took a year off and never went back. 

She recounted that she worked at a stables and gave riding lessons to the handicapped in exchange for board and feed for a horse that she never explained how or whether she owned: “And I shoveled manure.”

At 17, she met a friend who said she was a dancer. Daniels thought the friend meant she was a ballet dancer. “I was wrong.” Her friend was an exotic dancer. Daniels began dancing on weekends, which was “cool because I could make more in two nights than I could shoveling manure.”

“My mother was very neglectful,” Daniels testified. They lived in a “bad neighborhood, and she would just vanish,” Daniels said. She left home the house at 17, the age of emancipation adulthood in Louisiana. 

At 21, she did nude modeling for a magazine, which she testified was a necessary credential for a job performing in burlesque shows. She soon learned that “the dancers who made the most at the clubs were people who made adult films.”

Told she could “literally win Miss Nude North America” if she went that route, she traveled to California for the first time and was a “fully clothed” extra before being chosen over her friend by a “very famous” adult filmmaker. Her protestations about not wanting to be in porno films rang a little hollow here as she explained how she was chosen over her friend and claimed she was “Just doing one [film], so you can say you’ve done it.”

“At 23,  she was offered a contract with Wicked Pictures, where she was proud to say she wrote and directed as well as acted. This was not super-cheap, unscripted porn but “actual movies that have sex.” She said she was the youngest feature director in the adult film industry, with more than 100 credits.   

Daniels mentioned bit parts in Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, but did not testify to being “Lap Dancer #1,” and the porn actress Steve Carrell’s character is watching on TV, respectively.

In 2009, after a playful “Draft Stormy” movement, she considered running a pro-reproductive rights campaign against incumbent Louisiana’s Senator David Vitter, a hypocritical right-winger who had patronized prostitutes. “Even I was a better choice than this guy,” she said, one of several comments one could find either inappropriate for a witness— or just funny. While not sure how the jury was reacting, I was in the latter category. 

Trump, then 60, and Daniels, then 27, met at a 2006 celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe. Wicked Pictures sponsored “a hole,” which Daniels said she found “very funny.” She had her now-famous picture taken with him as her boss introduced her as “contract star and director, Stormy Daniels.”

“Oh, you direct, too, you must be the smart one,” Trump said, according to Daniels. She had never seen his TV show but heard something about his involvement in professional wrestling. 

Later, they spoke in the gift room. Daniels didn’t know Trump’s age, but “I knew he was as old or older than my father.”

She testified that Trump was with another gentleman who told Daniels, “Mr. Trump would like to know if I wanted to have dinner with him.” That was Keith Schiller, his body man and procurer for years. 

Will Schiller testify? We still don’t know.

At this point, Hoffinger asked if the person under discussion was in the court. Daniels said yes and grimly gestured, “Navy blue jacket — at the table.” Trump scowled.

Here, I wrote a note to myself: “Doesn’t look or sound sketchy, but like a smart, uninhibited businessperson.”

When Schiller asked about dinner, “I said no.”

“He asked for my number, and I gave it to him…he messaged me, and I saved it.” That was introduced as an exhibit. While the jury learned last week that Trump had Stormy Daniels’ contact information, this was the first evidence of a relationship beyond the one photo.

Daniels testified that she only agreed to go out to dinner with Trump because she didn’t want to eat with her co-workers. “Catfight stuff,” she explained.

Her manager, identified only as Mike, told her eating with Trump could maybe help her get good business advice or an agent. “What could possibly go wrong?” she recalled Mike saying, to laughter in the media overflow room. (Reporters in the courtroom knew we risked ejection if we laughed.). 

Trump was staying across town at Harrah’s, and Daniels stopped off to see a friend. Schiller instructed her to take an elevator to the penthouse, and they would then go down to dinner. When she arrived, she said, Schiller was standing outside the door, which was cracked open, and told her to “Go on in.” 

Daniels remembered many details about the huge suite (“three times the size of my apartment”), from the flowers on a big wooden table to the tile pattern on the floor of the foyer, the latter of which the judge later used as an example of excessive detail in her testimony. 

Trump emerged wearing silk and satin pajamas. Daniels, unintimidated and apparently never at a loss for words, made fun of him: ”Did Mr. Hefner know you stole his pajamas?”

“I told him to go change, and he obliged very politely,” she recalled. He came back wearing a dress shirt and dress pants.

“I was a little bit early,” Daniels testified. “And he said after talking, we could either go down or eat here.” As the conversation moved to the suite’s dining room table, it seemed as if it would be the latter.

After pleasantries and questions about where she went to school, brothers and sisters (none), whether she was married, had a boyfriend or kids (no, no, and no), Trump asked how she got involved in the adult film business. He was “very interested in how I went from being an adult film star to writing and directing.”

“These were very thought-out business questions,” she said, about unions, how workers were paid, and “how often tested.” At the time, it was every 30 days. 

“Have you ever had a bad test?” Trump asked. 

She replied that she “never tested positive for anything,” before explaining to the jury that Wicked Pictures was a “condom mandatory company” where even in later years when she and her then-husband had sex on camera, they were required to use a condom. 

She explained to Trump, “Yes, some adult films have real scripts and are real movies, not just, ‘Oh, I am sorry, Mr. Pizza Boy,’ which is very offensive to me.” At this point, Daniels seemed to be doing in court what she proudly did in the film scripts she wrote, namely offering witty banter as foreplay. 

I doubt the jury buys that she never imagined what Trump had on his mind, especially after he responded to her question about whether he was married with, “Oh, don’t worry about that. We ... actually don’t even sleep in the same room.” But the five women jurors are likely to be sensitive to depicting Daniels as easy just because of her background.

When Daniels described how the conversation turned to the WNBA and pro-wrestling, the judge—for the second time— asked her to slow down. I was glad he did because her speed was challenging my hunt-and-peck typing skills, though I knew I could later check the transcript. 

Trump told Daniels that he and Vince McMahon, head of WWE, had bet on a competing wrestler, with the loser having to shave his head. 

“Some of us look good bald, some of us don't. I don't think you are that man,” Daniels said she told him, with the same cheekiness we are now seeing in court. “And he said, ‘Oh, no. No. No. I agree with you. All of that stuff is predetermined.’” I later googled it and found that the following year Trump “won” the bet and shaved McMahon’s head in front of 80,000 fans and tens of millions more on YouTube.

Trump began bragging about all the magazines he was on the cover of and showed her one. Daniels was not impressed. “It was not like I made a habit of reading financial magazines. I was just a 27 -year-old stripper.”

“It was almost like he wanted to one-up me — which is really hilarious when you think about it — to talk about himself.”

At this point, Daniels “had enough of his arrogance” and decided to take him on. “So I said, are you always this rude, arrogant and pompous? You don't even know how to have a conversation, and I was pretty nasty. I snapped. And he seemed to be taken aback.” Referring to the magazine, “I said, ‘Someone should spank you with that.’” He rolled it up and “gave me the look that he dared me. So, I took it from him and said, turn around. So, now I kind of had to.” She testified that she swatted him on the butt and that after that he was “much more polite.”

At this point, Trump appeared to mutter the word “bullshit” under his breath. The judge called a sidebar and said, as we later learned: “I understand that your client is upset at this point, but he is cursing audibly, and he is shaking his head visually— and that’s contemptuous. It has the potential to intimidate the witness and the jury can see that,” Merchan said. “You need to speak to him. I won’t tolerate that.” Blanche conveyed the message to Trump.

The truth is, I didn’t think the spanking story was bullshit, but I was concerned that Daniels seemed to be exaggerating her testimony to the point of off-putting self-promotion.

Daniels now started testifying about her business opportunities. As Trump dangled a possible appearance on Celebrity Apprentice, he said, “You remind me of my daughter because she is smart and blond and beautiful and people underestimate her as well.” Were the jurors creeped out? I saw only poker faces.

When Daniels said she wasn’t a businesswoman and was worried about losing badly, Trump told her the show could be rigged a bit so her team did relatively well. Daniels said that she told him something along the lines of, “You could go on the show and prove you aren’t just the dumb bimbo,”

Daniels said she told Trump, “People underestimate women, especially [figures] in the adult industry, when they see blond hair and big boobs…[So] that’s never gonna happen… Even you don’t have that much power.”

Daniels testified that she began thinking about how Trump might help her career. “I have no shame. That's who I am, but I also wanted to direct other, bigger things. They have bigger budgets and better catering.” That’s Daniels in a nutshell.

Daniels said she called a friend named Alana, who we learned outside the trial was Alana Evans, another porn star. Evans didn’t believe Daniels was meeting Donald Trump. Daniels put her on speakerphone and won her bet.

When Daniels then said, “He [Trump] was like, ‘Do you know anybody else?’” the first thing that went through my mind was that he wanted a three-way. But that was outside the purview of the case and was never explored.

During the break, the judge told prosecutor Susan Hoffinger that “this degree of detail is just unnecessary”—an admonition that would later prove important. 

When Daniels resumed her testimony, she explained that in the suite she excused herself to go to the bathroom. She said she wasn’t proud of it but she snuck a look at Trump’s toiletry bag and saw a gold manicure set with gold tweezers, Old Spice, and Pert-Plus. I’m an Old Spice guy myself—or was.

I want to take you through her testimony about the sex act in detail because it’s critical to assessing Trump’s motive for paying the hush money. He wanted to suppress untrue stories, too, like that of the doorman. But it was the thought of Daniels telling a convincing story just after the Access Hollywood tape and just before the election that must have terrified Trump. To win, the prosecution must drive home this point.

Daniels testified, “When I opened the bathroom door to come out, Mr. Trump had come into the bedroom and was on the bed, basically between myself and the exit” wearing boxer shorts and a tee shirt.

“At first, I was just startled, like a jump scare. I wasn't expecting someone to be there, especially minus a lot of clothing. That's when I had that moment where I felt the room spin in slow motion. I felt the blood leave my hands and my feet and almost like if you stand up too fast, and everything kind of spun, that happened too. Then I just thought, ‘Oh, my God, what did I misread to get here?’ The intention was pretty clear, somebody stripped down in their underwear and posing on the bed, like waiting for you.”

“When I exited, he was just up on the bed like this,” Daniels said, indicating with her body that he was leaning back.

“And I went to step around. I laughed nervously, and, you know, tried to make a joke out of it, and step around and leave. Even though I was moving like I was in a funhouse, like slow motion. I thought to myself: Great. I put myself in this bad situation…how did I misread everything.”

“He stood up between me and the door, not in a threatening manner. He didn't come at me. He didn't rush at me. He didn't put his hands on me or anything like that. I said, ‘I got to go.’ He said, ‘I thought we were getting somewhere, we were talking, and I thought you were serious about what you wanted.”

Here Daniels paraphrased Trump to devastating effect: He was basically saying, “If you ever want to get out of that trailer park...” Daniels testified. “I was offended because I never lived in a trailer park.”

Here, Judge Merchan sustained the objection and instructed Hoffinger, “Move along.”

Daniels then testified, “I just think I blacked out. I was not drugged… I never insinuated that I was on drugs. I was not drunk.” I saw Trump whispering to Blanche.

The witnesses’ next lines would prove especially contentious.  “I did note there was a bodyguard right outside the door. There was an imbalance of power for sure. He was bigger and blocking the way.” Daniels made sure to add, “I was not threatened verbally or physically,” but the overall context recalled the stories that E. Jean Carroll and other women have told about Trump.

“The next thing I know, I was on the bed, somehow on the opposite side of the bed from where we had been standing. I had my clothes and shoes off. I believe my bra, however, was still on.”

When she added, “We were in the missionary position,” the objection was sustained.

The sex was brief and afterward, Daniels remembered, “I was staring at the ceiling. I didn't know how I got there. I made notes like I was trying to think about anything other than what was happening there.” 

She concluded this part of her testimony by describing, “Sitting on the end of the bed, noticing that it was completely dark outside now and that it was hard to get my shoes on, my hands were shaking so hard. I had on tiny strappy gold heels with little tiny buckles... I was having a hard time getting dressed.”

“He said, ‘Oh, great. Let's get together again honeybunch. We were great together.’ I just wanted to leave.”

Daniels went on to chronicle several non-sexual encounters with Trump, starting when the next day of the golf tournament he introduced his “littler friend Stormy” to “Big Ben,” Pittsburgh Steeler’s quarterback Ben Roethlisberger.

Later, she appeared at an event promoting Trump’s vodka brand, where Daniels sayid Trump introduced him to Karen McDougal. So to get this straight, Trump introduced his mistress to the woman he had cheated on her with.

In the years that followed, Daniels talked to Trump several times by phone, in the earshot of many others, and met him at Trump Tower. He finally told her that some senior NBC executive had vetoed her appearance on Celebrity Apprentice because she was a porn star, though Jenna Jamison later appeared on the show.

Daniels described a 2011 incident in the parking lot of a Las Vegas shopping mall when she and her infant daughter were en route to a Mommy and Me exercise class. She said an unidentified man approached her and “he threatened me if I continued to tell my story.” Daniels said she didn’t call the police or tell her ailing and alcoholic husband, who also knew nothing of her sexual encounter with Trump. 

A lawyer friend counseled her that she would be safer if her story was known and her agent, Gina Rodriguez, began shopping it. When she learned that Michael Cohen, on behalf of Trump, was interested in buying and burying her story, she felt “That was the best thing that could happen because then my husband wouldn't find out, but there was still documentation of a money exchange and a paperwork exchange, so that I would be safe and the story wouldn't come out.”  

How did Stormy do on the stand? I didn’t trust my own reactions. For weeks, this whole no-lingering-in-the-hall-except-in-line-to-the-bathroom thing was lending a single sex, non-coed vibe to the breaks that I didn’t appreciate. Since women are mostly more intuitive about things, I felt deprived of their analysis of how her testimony was going. I feared that I was missing some very shrewd takes in the women’s room.

Unfortunately, some women—and plenty of men— are touchy about sharing their views outside of their news organizations. I missed the old days of talking shop at the courthouse. I was never a regular trial reporter but I did have great memories of being a cub reporter for Newsweek in 1984 and sitting at the knee of the brilliant columnist Murray Kempton during the concurrent libel cases that General William Westmoreland, former commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, brought against CBS News, and retired Israeli General Ariel Sharon brought against Time Magazine, both tried at the same time in the same federal courthouse on Foley Square. I’ll never forget Murray and novelist Renata Adler and long-dead straight news reporters holding court in the courthouse. Those days are over, at least for trials of this importance.