Who is Stormy Daniels? A look at one of the key witnesses in the Trump hush money trial
Stormy Daniels, a key witness in former President Donald Trump’s criminal hush money trial in Manhattan, testified in the case on Tuesday [Reuters], detailing her alleged sexual encounter with Trump in 2006, which Trump denies. She alleges she was paid $130,000 in 2016 to prevent her from going public with her story right before the presidential election. Here’s a closer look at who she is and her background:
👤 Who is Stormy Daniels?
Daniels, 45, is an adult film actress, writer and director from Baton Rouge, La. Her real name is Stephanie Clifford and she got her start as an exotic dancer in Louisiana before moving to Los Angeles to star in adult films. She has appeared in box-office movie hits, including The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up. In 2014, Daniels [CNN] was inducted into the Adult Video News Hall of Fame.
She wrote a tell-all book, Full Disclosure, that came out in 2018 that divulged salacious details [The Guardian] about her alleged one-night stand with Trump in 2006 during a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, Calif. Trump has repeatedly denied having sex with Daniels.
Daniels has been married four times. She has one daughter with third husband Glendon Crain. The two married in 2015 and divorced in 2018 after Crain alleged Daniels wasn’t truthful [People] about what happened with Trump before they met. They eventually worked out a custody agreement regarding their then 7-year-old daughter, who is Daniels’s only child.
🎬 What Stormy Daniels has been up to
In December 2022, Daniels married her fourth and current husband, adult-film actor Barrett Blade, who has largely stayed out of the public eye.
She appears in the recent Stormy documentary [Business Insider], released in March by NBC’s streaming service Peacock, in which she reveals that the $293,000 in legal fees she was ordered to pay Trump five years ago have grown from to more than $600,000 with accumulated interest. Daniels says she would rather do prison time than pay him any money.
Daniels also says in the documentary that she has been trying to live a normal life with her daughter and husband, but her allegations against Trump have made that difficult [AFP].
⚖️ How is she connected to Trump’s Manhattan criminal hush money trial?
Daniels testified on Tuesday [Associated Press] that she met Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, Calif., in July 2006. She alleges that Trump invited her to his hotel suite for dinner where the two discussed the possibility of her appearing on his show, The Apprentice, and then engaged in sex.
Daniels testified she kept in touch with Trump over the next year so she could follow up with him about casting her on his show. She claims that the last contact she had with Trump was in 2008, when he told her she wouldn’t appear on The Apprentice.
Allegations of the sexual encounter between Trump and Daniels arose in 2011 and 2016 [ABC News]. Days before the 2016 presidential election, Daniels signed a nondisclosure agreement and accepted $130,000 in exchange for not publicly discussing her alleged relationship with Trump.
At the time, Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer, had issued the payments to Daniels’s lawyer. Prosecutors allege that when Trump reimbursed Cohen in 2017 — after Trump won the 2016 election — business records were falsified to hide these hush money payments from voters to cover up the alleged 2006 affair with Daniels.
In New York state, falsifying business records in the first degree is a low-level felony. Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records, which include checks, invoices and the general ledger related to Cohen’s reimbursement.
