An attorney for porn star Stormy Daniels testified at Donald Trump‘s trial Thursday that he “would never” describe the $130,000 payment to her as “hush money.”
Testimony from Daniels’s former attorney Keith Davidson is viewed as a key component of the prosecution’s case that Trump and his allies plotted to hide damaging stories in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. As prosecutors questioned him from the stand on Thursday, the porn star’s attorney made a surprising dispute of the definition of the “hush money.”
“Would you use the phrase hush money to describe the money that was paid to your client by Donald Trump?” prosecutor Joshua Steinglass asked.
“I would never use that word,” Davidson said, adding he would describe it as a “consideration in a civil settlement.” Trump denies having a sexual encounter with Daniels.
The description of the alleged sexual encounter that prosecutors say Trump sought to cover up using his former attorney and fixer Michael Cohen was also subject to scrutiny by Davidson on Thursday.
Davidson went to great lengths to defend a January 2018 statement he wrote on behalf of Daniels denying a news report that Cohen had paid $130,000 to silence her claims of a sexual encounter with Trump, a payment that Daniels’s attorney said he took a $10,000 cut from.
For example, the 2018 statement’s claim that she never had a “sexual and/or romantic affair with Donald Trump” could technically be true, Davidson argued, if you were to “hone in on the definition of romantic, sexual and affair.”
“I don’t think anyone has ever alleged that any interaction between she and Mr. Trump was romantic,” the lawyer said from the stand, prompting some people in the room to laugh, including prosecutors.
Cross-examination began later in the day, where Trump attorney Emil Bove became visibly frustrated at times with Davidson and raised his voice when he declined to answer questions about his previous work securing settlements for clients to suppress embarrassing information about other celebrities.
Bove tapped Judge Juan Merchan to help him compel answers from Davidson after the witness claimed he didn’t remember the deals or wasn’t authorized to speak about them. Merchan refused to help.
“We’re both lawyers. I’m not here to play lawyer games with you,” Bove said after Davidson invoked attorney-client privilege several times during cross-examination. Davidson at one point invoked attorney-client privilege when asked if he had negotiated a similar deal with the actor Charlie Sheen.
Meanwhile, Trump could be seen paying careful attention to Davidson testify as Bove continued to grill him from the witness stand, according to press pool reports.
Bove appeared to be suggesting that other nondisclosure agreements Davidson brokered for previous clients were essentially extortion of celebrities.
Davidson is the prosecution’s sixth witness and walked the jury through the $130,000 payment he negotiated with Cohen on behalf of Daniels that is at the core of the case. Bove intended to poke holes at his memory and character by questioning his alleged work in other celebrity cases but was met with roadblocks during his first round of cross-examination.
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Earlier in the day, Merchan held a gag order hearing considering four additional allegations against Trump after he was fined $1,000 per nine violations earlier this week. The judge has yet to rule on the other alleged violations.
The court broke for lunch at around 1 p.m. local time and is set to resume at 2:15 p.m.