Adult film star Stormy Daniels returned to the stand in Donald Trump’s criminal trial Thursday, pushing back during cross-examination against his defense attorney’s attempts to discredit her in sometimes bizarre and uncomfortable exchanges.
After she was done testifying in Manhattan criminal court in New York, Trump’s attorney Todd Blanche moved again for a mistrial, saying she’d changed her story and been allowed to testify about matters that were irrelevant to the case. He also asked the judge to waive Trump’s gag order to allow him to respond to her testimony publicly. State Judge Juan Merchan denied both requests.
“My concern is not just with protecting Ms. Daniels or a witness who has already testified. My concern is protecting the integrity of the proceedings as a whole,” Merchan said of the gag order request.
Trump blasted the judge’s actions on Thursday, calling them “a disgrace” to reporters in the courthouse afterwards. “I’m innocent and I’m being held in this court with a corrupt judge,” he said.
When Daniels was on the stand, Trump attorney Susan Necheles grilled her about the $130,000 nondisclosure agreement she signed with Trump’s then-attorney Michael Cohen near the close of the 2016 election and tried to poke holes in her now-sworn statements about the sexual encounter she says she had with Trump, which he denies.
Necheles asked her about the number of porn films she has written and directed and said, “You have a lot of experience making phony stories about sex.”
“Wow. That’s not how I would put it,” Daniels replied. “The sex in the films is very much real, just like what happened to me in that room” with Trump. She added, “If that story was untrue, I would’ve written it to be a lot better.”
Necheles and Daniels sparred over minor inconsistencies in Daniels’ stories, including her having said in a 2011 interview that she and Trump had dinner together while she now maintains they never actually ate.
“I had dinner in the room, but we never got any food, and we never ate anything,” Daniels said. Prosecutor Susan Hoffinger noted on re-direct examination that the article with the 2011 interview said the piece had been “lightly edited.”
Necheles also sought to dispute Daniels’ claims that she was scared when she saw Trump waiting for her in bed in a T-shirt and boxers after she got out of the bathroom, implying that a porn actor wouldn’t be caught off-guard by someone in underwear.
Necheles asked whether it was the first time in her life someone had made a pass at her. Daniels said it was the first time with somebody “twice my age and bigger than me” who had a bodyguard outside the door.
“You wanted money from President Trump, right?” Necheles asked earlier in their exchange. “No,” Daniels answered. “I never asked for money from President Trump,” she said. “I never asked for money from anyone in particular. I asked for money to tell my story” in 2016, and it was Cohen who approached her attorney with the NDA. She said she thought the agreement was “a perfect solution,” giving her a paper trail and peace of mind without having to tell her story publicly.
Daniels also acknowledged that she was irate when Cohen appeared to be stalling on paying the money but that he eventually paid. Necheles also asked about a statement she signed in 2018 denying she’d had an affair with Trump after The Wall Street Journal wrote about her NDA. Daniels said her lawyer had given her the statement and told her she had to sign it. She said she decided she wanted to tell her story later that year, after Cohen began talking about her publicly.
Asked whether she’d promised people she’d be instrumental in putting Trump in jail, Daniels said, “No.” Necheles then asked her about a social media post in which someone had called her a human toilet, and Daniels responded, “Exactly! Making me the best person to flush the orange turd down.” Necheles asked whether that meant she’d be instrumental in getting rid of him. Daniels said it was “hyperbole.”
“I’m also not a toilet,” she said.
Daniels spoke more slowly and seemed more confident Thursday than on her first day on the stand, but her voice shook some when Necheles asked her about various mean tweets she has been the target of, including ones referring to her as an “aging harlot” and a “disgusting degenerate prostitute.” “When somebody attacks me I’m going to defend myself,” she said, sounding like she was on the verge of tears.
After Daniels was done testifying, her lawyer Clark Brewster told NBC News she was “shaken” by the ordeal and “relieved” to be done.
“She was cross-examined over communications over years, and having your memory challenged like that and having to respond to questions immediately with recall is not easy, and it was quite an accomplishment,” Brewster said, adding, “She did a remarkable job of getting her testimony across.”
During the discussion about the defense’s renewed request for a mistrial, Merchan said he was surprised Trump’s lawyers didn’t object to certain parts of Daniels’ testimony.
He cited one part where Daniels said Trump told her: “I thought we were getting somewhere, we were talking, and I thought you were serious about what you wanted. If you ever want to get out of that trailer park.”
“I was offended because I never lived in a trailer park,” Daniels said.
The judge said he struck that part of her testimony.
Trump sat with his eyes closed for parts of Daniels’ testimony. He was accompanied to court by Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., who left in the late morning. On his way out of court, Scott took some jabs at three people whom Trump is prevented from criticizing by the gag order in the case — Judge Juan Merchan’s daughter, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s wife and prosecutor Matthew Colangelo.
Scott didn’t name any of the three, but it was clear from his remarks — including saying “the judge’s daughter is a political operative” — to whom he was referring. It’s unclear whether prosecutors will try to argue the comments violated the gag order. The ruling bars Trump from making “or directing others to make” comments about individual prosecutors or relatives of people involved with the case, in addition to remarks about witnesses and jurors.
Madeleine Westerhout, Trump’s former White House executive assistant, testified later in the day that she had seen Trump sign checks in the Oval Office and that he had been “very upset” by Daniels’ claims.
Westerhout said she got to know Trump while she was working at the Republican National Committee in 2016. She said there was concern at the RNC in October 2016 after the release of the so-called “Access Hollywood” tape, a 2005 recording of Trump saying he can grope women without their consent.
Asked whether there were conversations at the RNC about potentially replacing Trump as the Republican nominee at that time, Westerhout said there were.
Trump remained the nominee and won the election, and she said she helped the president-elect schedule meetings at Trump Tower, which is what led to her White House job.
Her duties included acting as an intermediary between Trump and his company the Trump Organization, coordinating with Rhona Graff, Trump’s assistant there, on issues that needed his or the company’s attention, like his travel schedule, mail or phone calls.
She said she asked Graff for a list of Trump’s contacts, which Graff forwarded to her. The list included information for Cohen and David Pecker, the former National Enquirer publisher who testified he worked with Trump and Cohen to suppress scandalous stories about Trump, including Daniels’ claim.
Westerhout said Trump was “very upset” when the Daniels story became public. She broke down in tears as she recalled losing her job in August 2019, after she shared personal information about Trump’s family at a dinner with reporters that she believed to be confidential. She called the incident a mistake and said, “I’ve learned a lot from my experience.” She also defended her former boss, saying she believed he has been treated unfairly. She will continue her testimony Friday.
After Daniels was done testifying, Blanche told the judge that she’d changed her story by saying she felt there was a power imbalance between them and that she blacked out and was light-headed when they began having sex. He also said there was no reason for prosecutors to have asked her about supposedly spanking him with a magazine before the encounter or for Daniels to have testified that Trump did not use a condom.
“That has nothing to do with the false business record, but it’s so prejudicial. It’s a dog whistle for rape,” Blanche said.
Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass told Merchan: “Those messy details, that is motive. That is Mr. Trump’s motive” for buying her silence. He also suggested that Trump could rebut the story under oath. “If they want to offer testimony that the sex never happened, that’s their prerogative,” he said.
He also said there were some “very salacious details that were intentionally omitted because we did not have the desire to embarrass the defendant.”
Merchan said he agreed with Blanche that there shouldn’t have been questions or answers about the condom, but noted that there was no objection from attorneys to that line of questioning at the time. The judge also pointed out that Blanche had said in his opening statement that Trump didn’t have sexual relations with Daniels.
“Your denial puts the jury in a position of having to choose who they believe. Donald Trump, who denies that there was an encounter, or Stormy Daniels, who claims that there was,” Merchan said.
In addition to the sexual encounter, which Daniels said happened after she met Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, she told jurors that Trump made a sexual advance in 2007, which she rejected. Four years later, she said, a mysterious man warned her to “leave Trump alone” after she gave an interview to a magazine about their first encounter. Daniels said the article never ran thanks to Trump’s then-“fixer” and lawyer Cohen.
Cohen later paid Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about her claim. Trump’s reimbursement of that money to Cohen is at the heart of the criminal case against Trump, who is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records related to the repayment. He has pleaded not guilty.
Daniels was followed on the stand by Rebecca Manochio, a Trump Organization employee who was an assistant to the company’s former chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg. She said that after Trump went to the White House, she would FedEx checks for him to sign and then get them to the proper person at the company when they were returned. Her testimony was used to enter records relating to Trump’s checks to Cohen.
After Manochio, prosecutors called Tracy Menzies, an executive at HarperCollins Publishers. She was brought in to read into the record from a book Trump co-authored for the company called “Think Big: Make It Happen in Business and Life.” One of the 2007 book’s chapters was titled “Do Not Trust Anyone.”
“I just can’t stomach disloyalty,” the book reads, mentioning a woman who had been disloyal. “I go out of my way to make her life miserable,” the book says. “My motto is ‘Always get even. When somebody screws you, screw them back in spades.’”
The DA’s office is nearing its final set of witnesses. Steinglass estimated this week that prosecutors would be done presenting their case by May 21.
One person who won’t be testifying is Karen McDougal, the former Playboy model who claims she had a monthslong affair with Trump that began in 2006 and was paid $150,000 to keep quiet in 2016 by the National Enquirer. Trump has denied her claim. Blanche told Merchan that prosecutors informed him she wouldn’t be taking the stand.
