Adult film actress Stormy Daniels, who will continue to testify Thursday at former President Donald Trump's criminal trial in New York, is a key figure in the controversy over a 2016 “hush money” payment allegedly made to Daniels. on behalf of Trump.
Trump faces 34 counts of falsifying business documents related to reimbursing his former lawyer Michael Cohen for payments made shortly before the 2016 election to cover up Trump's alleged affair with Daniels. Trump pleaded not guilty and denied the matter.
Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, claims she had a one-night stand with Trump in 2006. Controversy arose in January 2018, when the Wall Street Journal reported on the $130,000 payment.
In “Stormy,” a documentary that premiered on Peacock in March, Daniels said she accepted the payment to protect her husband and daughter and “so that there would be a paper trail and a money trail linking me to Donald Trump so that “I couldn’t get them to kill me.”
“I was completely sure I was going to die,” Daniels said in the documentary.
New York prosecutors have alleged that Trump sought to undermine the integrity of the 2016 election by suppressing negative information that would harm his campaign. According to charging documents, Trump “repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal criminal conduct that concealed damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election.”
Read more about Daniels and his role in the case.
