Stormy Daniels was greeted by deep silence as she entered her courtroom session on Tuesday, May 7, broken only by the sound of her high heels clicking on the floor as she walked behind a police officer. At 10:30 am, the former adult film actress walked behind defendant Donald Trump and took her place in the witness stand. Twelve jurors were sitting on her right. Judge Juan Merchan was on her left. Daniels was dressed all in black. She wanted to seem reserved: a tall order. A tattoo was visible on her right arm. Sitting down, she put on her glasses. The former president, meanwhile, looked elsewhere.
She asked to be called Stormy Daniels, the stage name that has consumed her original identity: Stephanie Clifford, the young girl born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who became a porn star. Her one-night stand with Donald Trump in 2006 is an essential, but not central, part of the case against the former president. The charges against him are of falsifying accounting documents to conceal a payment of $130,000 to Daniels, in exchange for her silence ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
For two hours, the witness recounted her difficult childhood, and then the life that came after. Her parents divorced when she was 4 and her family was "very low-income." She lived with her "very neglectful" mother, who "would disappear for days at a time." In high school, she worked in the school newspaper and wanted to become a veterinarian. Her main activities were ballet and horse riding, which she was passionate about. Toward the end of high school, however, another life started taking shape. Through a friend, she discovered suggestive "exotic dancing," which allowed her to earn "more in two nights than I did shoveling manure eight hours a day" at the horse riding club. Daniels posed nude at the age of 21. She agreed to star in a pornographic film two years later. Her future career was mapped out and she listed its various stages: Success, fame and no regrets. At this point in recounting her life story, the witness appeared rather relaxed, already used to this exercise in self-description, after so many interviews and the publication of her book.
Then came 2006 and the famous Lake Tahoe golf tournament. Daniels was one of the hostesses. She was under contract with Wicked Pictures Productions. "Wicked sponsored one of the holes on the golf course," she said, adding: "It’s kind of funny that an adult film company was sponsoring one of the holes in the tournament." No one smiled among the jurors. It was there, on the course, that she met Trump, then an entrepreneur and TV star, host of the reality TV show The Apprentice. "He was as old or older than my father," Daniels noted. He was 60 and she was 27 at the time.
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