Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg‘s criminal case against Donald Trump is technically about whether the former president illegally falsified business records, but you wouldn’t know it based on much of the media coverage of the trial.
And although Bragg has failed to identify who Trump supposedly defrauded when he recorded payments to former fixer-turned-foe Michael Cohen as services paid rather than a reimbursement, there’s one person who is decidedly not the loser in this unsavory deal: Stormy Daniels, the porn star who allegedly received a six-figure payment from Cohen to remain silent over a one-night stand with Trump nearly 20 years ago.
For nearly half a decade now, Daniels has profited off the unearthed liaison with books, media appearances, and a national strip club tour, and even so, she still refuses to pay Trump half a million dollars in court-ordered legal fees. In the liaison that is arguably auxiliary at best to the criminal case at hand, Daniels has never argued that Trump so much as touched her without her informed consent that he was a married man with a newborn baby and wife at home. And yet, the press have painted Daniels, who took the stand in Manhattan last week, as a victim.
“Stormy Daniels court appearance reopens wounds for Trump’s #MeToo accusers,” declares an ostensibly objective news headline at the Washington Post, equating Daniels with women alleging they were actual victims of sexual battery or assault by Trump.
“For Karena Virginia, who in 2016 accused Trump of touching her breast outside a different U.S. Open tournament in 1998, the response to her and other women’s allegations has been more traumatic than the incident itself,” the Post‘s Hannah Knowles writes. “At some points over the past week, she said, ‘I felt myself very frozen.’ When she heard people dismissing the behavior Daniels described, she said, it reminded her of how she and other women felt shrugged off. ‘It’s the responses — it’s the overhearing the conversations in the grocery store or even just when I dropped off some paperwork at a doctor’s office and the receptionist was just chatting with me and saying’ — in reference to the trial where Daniels testified — ‘how, you know, men will be boys,’ Virginia said.”
But what “behavior” did Daniels actually describe? Not sexual misconduct of any kind, which Virginia is alleging, but rather a consensual copulation that began with Daniels spanking Trump with a magazine after she instructed him to take his pants down. He was not her employer, and she was not a subordinate. Per Daniels’s own repeated admissions, Trump did not threaten her, implicitly or explicitly, with physical force, reputational damage, or lost job opportunities if she declined to sleep with him. If anything, this exemplified the logical conclusion of the sexual revolution: a famous sex worker choosing to have consensual sex with a billionaire, no strings attached.
And yet, the Atlantic drew a parallel between Daniels and “people who have lived in some way in the shadow of sexual violence.”
“Particularly brutal was Daniels’s own frustration with herself for having ended up in a situation where Trump expected sex from her,” Quinta Jurecic writes. “On the stand, she seemed bitter over her own misapprehension that Trump had been interested in having a real conversation about her career aspirations. She had wanted ‘to be taken seriously as a writer and director’ and hoped that appearing on The Apprentice might help get her there. Again, this carries an echo of Harvey Weinstein, and the many women who described their disappointment when they realized that the producer had no real interest in their work but saw them only as an object for abuse.'”
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Recall: Weinstein has been convicted beyond a reasonable doubt of outright rape in two separate criminal jurisdictions and often used the threat of blackballing his victims as mechanisms to silence them. The case of Daniels could not be any more opposite, as it appears the only quid pro quo for her career was in her own head.
Politico correctly notes that Daniels isn’t getting the “Monica Lewinsky” treatment from the press, and indeed, that is a good thing. Lewinsky was a 22-year-old intern when her married boss began a sexual affair with her, and the press ridiculed everything from her weight to her intelligence for the sin of succumbing to advances by the leader of the free world. Whatever we may think of Daniels’s career choices, she doesn’t deserve to be criticized any more than Trump for engaging in an adulterous affair, but obviously, there has been an overcorrection here. Just as the press wrongly painted Lewinsky as the villain and aggressor to achieve its political aims of protecting then-President Bill Clinton, today the media are fallaciously framing Daniels as a victim in their goal of getting Trump out of the 2024 race. Daniels may be many things, but a weak woman without sexual agency in that hotel room with Trump, she was not.