Last week, after Stormy Daniels spent nearly eight hours over two days testifying at former President Trump's hush money trial in New York, it seemed like the right time to open her memoir, “Full Disclosure.”
I had missed the book when it was published in 2018, but now that she has been a star witness in the first criminal trial of a former American president, a trial in which the memorable phrase “orange poop” was introduced, I wanted to read her version of her relationship with the man who claims he barely knew her and certainly never had sexual relations with her.
opinion columnist
Robin Abcarian
As you can imagine, Daniels, 45, who began her career as a stripper, has had a fascinating and tumultuous life. She's smart, bawdy, and hilariously self-aware.
For example, in 1999, while she was unconscious on the operating table, her plastic surgeon decided to drastically increase the size of the breast implants they had agreed upon. When she woke up, she writes, she was shocked and angry. But not by much. Her breasts, which she calls Thunder and Lightning, have been instrumental in her success.
“It's amazing,” he writes, “by the way, what blonde hair and big breasts do instantly.” Noted.
By the age of 22, Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, had become a successful adult film actress, writer and director.
In fact, she was so successful that in 2009 she was recruited to run against then-Louisiana Republican Senator David Vitter, a family values advocate who was revealed to have ties to prostitutes. “My ultimate goal,” she writes, “was to get someone more qualified to step up.” Her motto in that brief campaign: “Stormy Daniels: Screw people honestly.”
He had small roles in the Judd Apatow films “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up.” For a Maroon 5 music video, she chased Adam Levine in a sexy cop costume.
Apatow's producer, Shauna Robertson, invited her to join her on the sets of “Pineapple Express,” “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and “Superbad,” which is how she learned to make movies.
After the hush money scandal broke in 2018, Seth Rogen told Ellen DeGeneres, “I've known Stormy Daniels for a long time, and to be honest, she may have mentioned this stuff about 10 years ago. At that time, when you asked a porn star who she had slept with and the answer was Donald Trump, it was the least surprising thing she could have said.”
The reason she agreed to have dinner with Trump that fateful night in 2006, at the urging of her publicist, was because she thought he could help her career. When she met him that same day, she had been impressed that he had looked at her face, not her breasts. She wanted to know everything about the business aspects of the porn industry.
She spent three hours in his hotel penthouse and still seems angry that he never served dinner. “I am motivated by food,” she testified.
I have no doubt that she is telling the truth about their sexual encounter, nor that she submitted to it without being physically forced to get it over with. There was certainly, as she testified, an “imbalance of power.” She was almost 60 years old; she was 27 years old. Her bodyguard was stationed outside her door.
I also do not doubt, as she testified, that she was surprised when she came out of the bathroom and found him lying on the bed in his underwear, nor that his hands were shaking so much afterwards that he had trouble putting on his shoes.
And when it was over, I have no doubt that Trump really said, as she writes: “Oh, that was just great. “We are very good together, honey.” (I mean, who could make that up?)
Trump, then reality TV's biggest star thanks to “The Apprentice,” had raised the possibility of her appearing on his show. He thought it would be a big help for ratings to have a porn star as a contestant.
“You'd be fabulous in that,” she says he told her. “You would be huge.”
That's the only reason she met him again in July 2007 at his bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, she writes, and took his many phone calls until January 2008, when it became clear there was no way NBC would feature him. a porn star on his hit show.
I'm not sure I fully understand why it was so important to put Daniels on the stand hour after hour last week and focus so much on whether she and Trump actually had sex in 2006, something he denies.
Aren't their denials, after all, clearly false? He is a man who brags about grabbing women by the genitals and says, “When you're a star, they let you do it.” And he has been found liable in a civil trial for what the judge called rape “as many people commonly understand the word.”
Still, the question in the hush money trial is not whether she actually had sex with Daniels. It involves whether she falsified business records to cover up a $130,000 payment to Daniels for her silence during the 2016 election.
Of course he did. But only a jury can decide whether that was illegal.
That makes Stormy Daniels, fascinating as her testimony is, a sideshow at the trial.
Whether Trump is convicted or not, Daniels has secured her place in presidential history. After all, sideshows are often the most memorable part of the circus.
