When Donald J. Trump met Stormy Daniels, their flirtation seemed fleeting: He was a 60-year-old married mogul at the peak of reality television fame, and she was 27, not half his age, a Louisiana native raised in poverty and headed to porn-film stardom.
But that chance encounter in Lake Tahoe, Nev., some two decades ago set off a chain of events that has brought the nation the first criminal trial of an American president.
And on Tuesday, Ms. Daniels took the stand at that trial, bringing the former president face to face with the porn star at the case’s center.
The charges stem from her story of sex with Mr. Trump during that 2006 celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, a story she was shopping a decade later, in the closing days of the presidential campaign. Mr. Trump’s longtime lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, paid her $130,000 in hush money before Election Day, and the former president is accused of falsifying business records to cover up reimbursements for Mr. Cohen.
Ms. Daniels’s fast-paced testimony lasted nearly five hours, during which she described an encounter with Mr. Trump, now 77, that he has long denied. Tension gripped the courtroom, her garrulous testimony filling a heavy silence. She made jokes; they did not land.
After about a half-hour on the stand, she began to unspool intimate details about Mr. Trump, so much so that the judge balked at some of the testimony. He implied it was gratuitously vulgar, and the defense sought a mistrial.
Ms. Daniels said the future president had invited her to dinner inside his palatial Lake Tahoe hotel suite. He answered the door wearing silk pajamas. When he was rude, she playfully spanked him with a rolled-up magazine. And when she asked about his wife, he told her not to worry, that they didn’t even sleep in the same room — prompting Mr. Trump to shake his head in disgust and mutter “bullshit” to his lawyers, loud enough that it drew a private rebuke from the judge, who called it “contemptuous.”
Ms. Daniels then recounted the sex itself in graphic detail. It happened, she said, after she returned from the bathroom and found Mr. Trump in his boxer shorts and T-shirt. She tried to leave and he blocked her path, though not, she said, in a threatening manner. The sex was brief, she said, and although she never said no, there was a “power imbalance.”
“I was staring up at the ceiling, wondering how I got there,” she told the jury, adding that Mr. Trump did not wear a condom.
The testimony was an astonishing moment in American political history and a crowning spectacle in a trial full of them: a porn star, across from a former and potentially future president, telling the world what she was once paid to keep quiet about.
Ms. Daniels, 45, has told her story widely — to prosecutors, reporters, her friends, in a book — but never to jurors, and not with Mr. Trump in the room. Her appearance on the stand appeared to unnerve Mr. Trump as she aired his dirty laundry, under oath, in mortifying detail.
But Ms. Daniels’s story is not just a sordid kiss-and-tell tale; it spotlights what prosecutors say was Mr. Trump’s criminality. He is accused of engineering the false business records scheme to cover up all traces of their tryst: the hush money, the repayment to Mr. Cohen and, yes, the sex.
While the defense cast the testimony as a smear, Ms. Daniels provided prosecutors with some useful details. She established the fundamental story of her encounter with Mr. Trump. And she testified that she would have told the same uncomfortable tale in 2016, had she not taken the hush money from Mr. Trump’s fixer.
But her testimony, at times, seemed problematic for the prosecutors who had called her. Ms. Daniels testified that money was not her motivation, and that she wanted to get her story out. That could draw skepticism from jurors, who have heard that she accepted the $130,000 and, in exchange, did not tell her story for more than a year.
“My motivation…
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