When Donald J. Trump met Stormy Daniels, their flirtation appeared fleeting: He was a 60-year-old married mogul on the peak of actuality tv fame, and he or she was 27, not half his age, a Louisiana native raised in poverty and headed to porn-film stardom.
However that likelihood encounter in Lake Tahoe, Nev., some 20 years in the past set off a series of occasions that has introduced the nation the primary felony trial of an American president.
And on Tuesday, Ms. Daniels took the stand at that trial, bringing the previous president head to head with the porn star on the case’s heart.
The costs stem from her story of intercourse with Mr. Trump throughout that 2006 movie star golf event in Lake Tahoe, a narrative she was buying a decade later, within the closing days of the presidential marketing campaign. Mr. Trump’s longtime lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, paid her $130,000 in hush cash earlier than Election Day, and the previous president is accused of falsifying enterprise data to cowl up reimbursements for Mr. Cohen.
Ms. Daniels’s fast-paced testimony lasted practically 5 hours, throughout which she described an encounter with Mr. Trump, now 77, that he has lengthy denied. Pressure gripped the courtroom, her garrulous testimony filling a heavy silence. She made jokes; they didn’t land.
After a few half-hour on the stand, she started to unspool intimate particulars about Mr. Trump, a lot in order that the decide balked at a few of the testimony. He implied it was gratuitously vulgar, and the protection sought a mistrial.
Ms. Daniels stated the longer term president had invited her to dinner inside his palatial Lake Tahoe resort suite. He answered the door carrying silk pajamas. When he was impolite, she playfully spanked him with a rolled-up journal. And when she requested about his spouse, he advised her to not fear, that they didn’t even sleep in the identical room — prompting Mr. Trump to shake his head in disgust and mutter “bullshit” to his legal professionals, loud sufficient that it drew a personal rebuke from the decide, who referred to as it “contemptuous.”
Ms. Daniels then recounted the intercourse itself in graphic element. It occurred, she stated, after she returned from the lavatory and located Mr. Trump in his boxer shorts and T-shirt. She tried to depart and he blocked her path, although not, she stated, in a threatening method. The intercourse was transient, she stated, and though she by no means stated no, there was a “energy imbalance.”
“I used to be staring up on the ceiling, questioning how I bought there,” she advised the jury, including that Mr. Trump didn’t put on a condom.
The testimony was an astonishing second in American political historical past and a crowning spectacle in a trial stuffed with them: a porn star, throughout from a former and probably future president, telling the world what she was as soon as paid to maintain quiet about.
Ms. Daniels, 45, has advised her story extensively — to prosecutors, reporters, her buddies, in a e-book — however by no means to jurors, and never with Mr. Trump within the room. Her look on the stand appeared to unnerve Mr. Trump as she aired his soiled laundry, underneath oath, in mortifying element.
However Ms. Daniels’s story isn’t just a sordid kiss-and-tell story; it spotlights what prosecutors say was Mr. Trump’s criminality. He’s accused of engineering the false enterprise data scheme to cowl up all traces of their tryst: the hush cash, the compensation to Mr. Cohen and, sure, the intercourse.
Whereas the protection solid the testimony as a smear, Ms. Daniels supplied prosecutors with some helpful particulars. She established the elemental story of her encounter with Mr. Trump. And he or she testified that she would have advised the identical uncomfortable story in 2016, had she not taken the hush cash from Mr. Trump’s fixer.
However her testimony, at occasions, appeared problematic for the prosecutors who had referred to as her. Ms. Daniels testified that cash was not her motivation, and that she wished to get her story out. That might draw skepticism from jurors, who’ve heard that she accepted the $130,000 and, in alternate, didn’t inform her story for greater than a 12 months.
“My motivation wasn’t cash,” she stated. “It was motivated out of worry, not cash.”
The jury additionally noticed the decide, Juan M. Merchan, scold Ms. Daniels a minimum of twice, instructing her to stay to the questions requested of her. At one level, he even issued his personal objection, interrupting her testimony as she started to explain the sexual place she and Mr. Trump assumed.
Justice Merchan, usually a stoic presence with a decent grip over his courtroom, confirmed uncommon exasperation because the testimony veered in a scurrilous route and the trial took on a circuslike ambiance.
He additionally requested Ms. Daniels to decelerate. She was a rapid-fire talker, vulnerable to laughter and prolonged asides.
Outdoors the jury’s presence, the decide acknowledged that “there have been some issues higher left unsaid” in her testimony and steered that Ms. Daniels might need “credibility points.”
But he rejected the protection’s bid for a mistrial, as a substitute inviting Mr. Trump’s legal professionals to mount an aggressive questioning of Ms. Daniels.
“The extra occasions this story has modified, the extra fodder for cross-examination,” he stated.
Susan Necheles, the Trump lawyer who led the cross-examination, heeded the decide’s recommendation.
She painted Ms. Daniels as a mendacity opportunist. She unearthed excerpts from Ms. Daniels’s e-book to recommend that her story had modified over time. And in a probably troublesome second for Ms. Daniels, Ms. Necheles implied that she had fabricated an account of a Trump supporter threatening her and her daughter in a Las Vegas car parking zone, a narrative she didn’t share along with her child’s father.
“Your daughter’s life was in jeopardy and also you didn’t inform her father, proper?” Ms. Necheles requested, the implication being that the story was phony.
Ms. Daniels was indignant. And through some cross-examination, she parried successfully, performing even higher than she did along with her solutions to prosecutors.
Her testimony introduced full circle one of many earliest scandals that loomed over Mr. Trump’s presidency. Ever since The Wall Avenue Journal broke the information six years in the past that Mr. Cohen had paid her to maintain quiet, her story has modified the course of American politics and laid the groundwork for the case.
Over time, Ms. Daniels has leaned into her Trump-adjacent fame. She has offered merchandise, filmed a documentary, sat for high-profile interviews and written a e-book that was so tell-all it included detailed descriptions of the previous president’s genitalia. Mr. Trump has additionally dished out insults that ridiculed her look, calling her “horseface.”
However at different occasions, Ms. Daniels appeared tortured, detailing the private toll of outsize publicity. All of a sudden, she was not only a porn star however a risk to a person who instructions essentially the most fervent political motion in trendy American historical past. She advised reporters she was inundated by threats from Trump supporters, a lot of which had been graphic. She feared for her household and has divorced her third husband, the daddy of her daughter.
“I’ve been simply tormented for the final 5 years or so,” she stated within the opening scene of “Stormy,” a documentary about her life that was launched on Peacock. “And right here I’m, I’m nonetheless right here.”
Ms. Daniels joined the trial at a pivotal second. On Monday, prosecutors had requested two veterans of the Trump Group’s accounting division to indicate jurors the 34 data they are saying Mr. Trump falsified to hide his reimbursement of Mr. Cohen for the hush cash. These embrace 11 invoices, 11 checks and 12 entries in Mr. Trump’s ledger that portrayed the funds as regular authorized bills.
Within the weeks forward, Mr. Cohen is anticipated to take the stand and join the dots between the salacious particulars and the substantive paperwork. On Tuesday, Ms. Daniels’s testimony took jurors by the smuttier components of the case.
She started by recounting a troublesome childhood in Baton Rouge. Her mother and father break up up when she was younger, she stated.
She wished to be a veterinarian, and was editor of her highschool newspaper. Ultimately, she started stripping, she says, as a result of she earned greater than she did shoveling manure at a horse steady.
By the point she met Mr. Trump on the golf event in 2006, she was a participant in porn. She was an actress, and would finally discover her footing as a director and producer.
Requested to determine Mr. Trump within the courtroom, she referred to as him out as the person in a navy swimsuit jacket. Ms. Daniels, wearing all black and carrying glasses, diminished the singular former president to simply one other man within the courtroom.
She spent a lot of her testimony describing that first encounter in Lake Tahoe. When she met Mr. Trump, she knew he was a golfer and the host of the “The Apprentice,” the fact present that revived Mr. Trump’s movie star for a brand new era. In a memorable line, Ms. Daniels stated she additionally knew that he was “as previous or older than my father.”
Later that day, she stated, Mr. Trump’s aide approached and invited her to dinner. She says he took her quantity, however that her preliminary response was “eff no,” abbreviating an expletive.
However her publicist inspired her: “What may probably go mistaken?”
She then transported jurors inside his resort room, portray the sprawling suite in minute element, capturing each facet all the way down to the colour of the tiles.
She stated Mr. Trump had taken an curiosity in her enterprise and requested about unions, residuals and medical insurance, in addition to about testing for sexually transmitted ailments. “He was very fascinated with how I segued from changing into only a porn star to writing and directing,” she stated.
Ms. Daniels stated Mr. Trump advised her, “You remind me of my daughter. She is wise and blond and delightful, and folks underestimate her as effectively.”
She recalled going into the lavatory to do her lipstick, the place, she stated, she observed gold tweezers and Previous Spice.
Later, they stayed in contact, she stated. In 2007, they met at Trump Tower in New York, at a Trump Vodka launch celebration in Los Angeles and at a Beverly Hills resort — all interactions that appeared to undercut Mr. Trump’s claims that he barely knew her.
The jury was additionally proven contact logs from Ms. Daniels’s cellphone and from Mr. Trump’s assistant’s cellphone exhibiting that they remained in contact. And once they did discuss, she stated, Mr. Trump had a nickname for her: “honeybunch.”
They’ve solely spoken by legal professionals since then, most notably throughout the hush-money negotiations. When Ms. Necheles accused Ms. Daniels of utilizing that effort to “extort cash from President Trump,” Ms. Daniels objected.
“False,” she stated.
“That’s what you probably did, proper?” Ms. Necheles continued.
“False!” Ms. Daniels shouted.
Reporting was contributed by William Ok. Rashbaum, Kate Christobek, Jesse McKinley, Wesley Parnell and Matthew Haag.