With Donald Trump’s first criminal trial due to start in just three months, Stormy Daniels — who received hush money before the 2016 election — could yet be the one to derail his march towards a second term as president.
Stormy Daniels is perching on a sofa in a capaciously proportioned camper van somewhere in the state of Maryland. She’s spent the past week on a road trip here from Florida, where she lives with her husband of almost two years, Barrett Blade, and for the next two days will be signing photos and merchandise at Exxxotica Expo, a porn convention in Washington DC, before performing a “Sexy Xmas” strip show at Lust Gentleman’s Club in Martinsburg, West Virginia.
Today, the porn actress and director turned presidential bête noir is not court-ready coiffed as we’re mostly now used to seeing her. She’s in sweatpants and spectacles, her famous DDD breasts (named, by her, Thunder and Lightning) encased in a baggy checked flannel shirt. Not for long though, apparently.
Shortly, she says, she will be changing into a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader outfit in support of Blade’s team, who have a game this evening. “Which is terrible for me because I’m a [New Orleans] Saints fan,” she quips.
It’s tricky to tell if she’s joking, but my sense, knowing Daniels a little, is probably not. “He treats me like a queen and makes me feel safe, and he has such a nice family, and he loves my daughter so much,” she says. She has known Blade, her fourth husband, a cameraman and former porn actor, since she was 19, marrying him 24 years after they first met. “But I do have to put on the cheerleader outfit,” she giggles.
And Daniels, 44, is making the most of the road-tripping, stripping and watching American football while eating pizza in a cheerleader outfit while she can, aware that it’s surely the calm before another monumental (no pun intended) storm.
Earlier today, she got word that she will be called as a witness in former president Donald Trump’s first criminal trial, scheduled for March, and later this month she has a meeting for the first time with the prosecution team in New York. Trump, 77, is the first former president to face criminal charges: 91 so far, including those concerning the payment of $130,000 (around $212,000) in hush money to Daniels a week before the 2016 election.
The money relates to an alleged affair with Trump, which amounted, Daniels says, to one brief and disappointing sexual encounter in a hotel room in Nevada in 2006.
Trump has always maintained that he never slept with Daniels, although in May 2018 he did admit to “fully reimbursing” Michael Cohen, then his lawyer and fixer, the US$130,000. If they’d never had sex, then what was the money for? Daniels laughs. “I don’t know. I don’t think he’s ever answered that question.”
For almost six years now — since the Wall Street Journal broke the story about the hush money and accompanying non-disclosure agreement (NDA) in January 2018 — Daniels’ life has been a bizarre, dramatic soap opera. She has endured smear campaigns, bullying, intimidation, death threats and even, she claims, kidnap attempts on her daughter, now 13 years old.
Yet, the prospect of finally facing Trump in court is, she says, “a very double-edged sword for me. I was afraid for a moment that they were not going to call me to the stand. And I think that it would have, inadvertently perhaps, painted a picture that I was untrustworthy or not articulate or not a credible witness. That would have been a slap in the face, so I am very excited and grateful that I do get that opportunity.”
However, “The other side of me thinks, is it going to do any good? Am I going to fly halfway across the country, sit there and get grilled for hours, all for nothing? Or is this the time? Is this the chance? Is this the one that’s going to make the difference? I don’t want to get my hopes up too much, but that is what I hope.”
She’s more than aware of the magnitude of the trial. “People sometimes say to me — and they mean it well — ‘Isn’t it cool that you’re going to be in the history books one day?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, for having sex with the orange hobgoblin. That’s my legacy? Great.’
“People think that it defines my life, but it was 12 hours of it,” she says. “It’s annoying, because I’m so much more than that, and that’s all I’ll be known as.”
Whatever her qualms and quibbles, however, she sees it as “absolutely” her duty to testify. And she’s not afraid of facing down the former president. “I’ve seen him naked,” she wisecracks — as is her wont. “He’s never going to be scarier with his clothes on.”
Previously, she’s stated that Trump did not deserve to be jailed for the falsified business records in making the hush money payments (“I don’t think that his crimes against me are worthy of incarceration,” she said in April). Now, she feels differently. “Now that I know how many other transgressions there are? He’s not above the law,” she says. “And what precedent does that set for people in the future, like, ‘Well, he got away with it’? It’s a set-up for anarchy.
“So, yes, I want him to go to jail now — because I can’t imagine who comes after him,” she says.
But, she says, since Trump was charged on April 4, her role as lightning rod has become more entrenched. “There’s no grey area any more. People are very passionate and extreme on both sides — it’s, ‘You should die,’ or, ‘You’re a unicorn and you’re going to save the world.’ "
The former is terrifying, of course, but the latter — being the woman tasked with bringing down the former president— brings an unimaginable pressure. “This unicorn’s back is sore. Get off!” she says. “How long can you carry the weight before you get tired and you want to put it down for a minute?”
I first met Daniels five years ago in New York, towards the end of her first year in the unsought role of unlikely thorn in the president’s side.
She’d just released her memoir, Full Disclosure, which included a colourful, unsparing account of her two rendezvous with Trump, one sexual encounter (“I’d say the sex lasted two or three minutes. It may have been the least impressive sex I’d ever had”) and the (sadly) unforgettable description of his penis: “like the mushroom character in Mario Kart”.
After months of stories regarding what happened that night and afterwards, “I wanted to clear up the fact that I was not paid that night, that I did not go there thinking that I was going to have sex with a famous person, that I did not blackmail or extort the president,” Daniels told me of her motivation in writing the hastily published book. “I wanted people to know that I was thrilled to have the NDA. I was fine with saying nothing — that’s the classy thing to do. But I was not OK with lying.”
More so even than Trump being jailed, a win at court for her would be, she says, “It coming out that I was not lying. I just want to not be [seen as] a liar.”
This week sees the launch of Daniels’ new podcast, Beyond the Norm, mixing the unusual bedfellows of politics, porn and the paranormal (one of her obsessions, along with the occult and equestrianism) and interviewing guests from all three areas weekly.
The first episode features army veteran turned neo-Nazi hunter Kris Goldsmith, and future guests include former New York Times writer and UFO expert Ralph Blumenthal and political journalist Tina Nguyen, author of The MAGA Diaries. Each episode will begin with a ten-minute update on Daniels’s own, very abnormal life that week. “It’s a way for people to hear directly from me some of these crazy things. I wanted to call it From the Horse’s Mouth,” she says — Trump once called her “Horseface” — “but I was overruled.”
When we first met, in late 2018, Daniels was resolute about speaking up against the president. “I did the right thing,” she said. “Because I can look at myself in the mirror.” Her only regret was going to Trump’s hotel room in the first place: “If I could go back, I would say no,” she admitted.
We spoke again in late March this year, a matter of hours after news of the Trump indictment broke, and Daniels said the same: “I would still do the same thing, because it was the right thing to do.”
In the days following, however, she appeared to change her mind, telling Good Morning Britain that she regretted speaking out, “‘because nobody cares what the truth is any more. If people don’t want to face facts and see the truth… I’d rather have had the time back with my family,” she said.
At the time, not only was she receiving thousands of rape and death threats daily, but people were camped outside her home and attempting to climb over the walls of her property.
Today, with the former president now facing nearly 100 criminal charges in Georgia, Florida and Washington DC as well as New York — including racketeering, conspiracy and obstruction for efforts to overturn the 2020 election and charges relating to his handling of classified documents — the focus is less firmly on Daniels as the great white hope. She will always “fluctuate” a little in her feelings, she says, but “as bad as I feel at my worst, and have my biggest regrets, those very worst moments cannot possibly compare with the regret I would feel if I’d not stood up”, she says. “Because that is not the example I’d want to set for my daughter.”
If America — as some believe — got the president it deserved in Trump, it also perhaps got the adversary it never knew it needed in Daniels. Difficult for him to dismiss as a weaponised Democrat since her voting record is firmly Republican (although she maintains she never voted in 2016), or as a woolly leftie since she has stated firmly, “I believe in capitalism,” she is also tricky to intimidate, relishing her many tussles with trolls — “Twitter [X] is my favourite sport,” she enthuses. Although there have been dark moments when she confesses to have questioned everything, not least whether to carry on, she is still alive, she grins “out of spite and pettiness”.
But Daniels is complicated and complex, an imperfect and often unwilling heroine, who has refused to identify as a feminist (“It’s developed an over-the-top politically correct extreme sort of thing and I want no part of it”), said she feels sorry for men (“Now is not a good time to have a penis”), and stated that #MeToo had “become something out of control”.
However, she’s been on a journey of late. It began, she says, in 2019, when she watched Bombshell, the lightly fictionalised story of the women who took on Roger Ailes, the late Fox News CEO, sexual harasser and abuser.
Until then, says Daniels — ever unwilling to be cast as anyone’s victim — she’d viewed that night in the Nevada hotel room as regrettable, but consensual.
“He wasn’t aggressive, and I know for damn sure I could have outrun him if I tried, but I didn’t,” she writes in Full Disclosure. And in one of the most depressing yet relatable sentences in the whole book, she goes on to say, “As he was on top of me I replayed the previous three hours to figure out how I could have avoided this.”
She says Trump had lured her to his suite with the offer of a spot on The Celebrity Apprentice, and even promised to rig it so she won. Watching Bombshell, she says, “A lightbulb went off in my head.” She suddenly saw the power dynamic that meant the very notion of consent was made impossible.
“People will say, ‘You went to the hotel room. What were you thinking was going to happen? It’s your fault.’ " Now, she says, she knows, “It was not my fault.”
What is more difficult for her to deal with is not speaking up earlier. She’s read the accounts of many other women who have accused Trump of sexual assault from the early Eighties to 2013, at least one of which, she says, reads “identical to mine”.
Watching Bombshell, “I realised that every woman that came after me, they didn’t have the information to make an educated decision,” she says. “Now maybe those women would have made the same choices they did. But it wouldn’t have been because they didn’t have the information.
“I had a breakdown about that — is it all my fault that every woman after me, I inadvertently put them in that position? That’s the thing that I will never be able to forgive myself for.”
But she is trying to exercise some self-compassion. “I’ve explored that theme a bit, asking myself, ‘Why?’ Part of it, I think, is that I had a very absent mother and I grew up in the South, where you were taught to be demure and respectful of your elders, especially men,” she says.
Born Stephanie Clifford in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, it was a poor and dysfunctional childhood, with a father who left for a job in Alaska when she was four years old and never really came back, and a mother whose interest in her daughter, or anything remotely domestic, rapidly dwindled thereafter. “Rats moved in… but the real problem was roaches,” Daniels writes in her memoir. “I have scars on my legs from where they would bite me.”
“The deck has always been stacked against me,” she observes. “I should be living in a trailer back in Louisiana, with six kids and no teeth.”
She was bright, though, a keen horsewoman and a straight-A student — who began stripping on the side aged 17 — and won a place to study veterinary science, but deferred to work full-time asa stripper. Stripping then led to porn; veterinary plans remain deferred.
Daniels was also sexually assaulted by a neighbour from the age of nine — abuse that went on regularly for two years. When eventually she told a school guidance counsellor, her claims were dismissed. “Why would you lie?” she was asked.
“Being a rape survivor does not define me at all,” she writes. “If anything, what was ingrained into me was the expectation that I would not be believed if I ever asked for help.” It does not require unusual levels of empathy to understand why being believed is of such paramount importance to her now. Or why she has developed such reserves of resilience. “It hurts to remember being that vulnerable,” she writes.
Daniels was unsure whether to include the abuse in her memoir, “because I know how quickly my truth will be used against me by people who want to prove that women involved in the adult entertainment business are all ‘damaged’ “.
While never having been remotely apologetic for her profession, which she maintains is “entertainment not education”, Daniels accepts that her job has allowed room for Trump and others to undermine and discredit her.
“Can you think of a single time that ‘porn star’ wasn’t put in front of my name?” she says. “Imagine if I did something else — would ‘school teacher Stormy Daniels’ or ‘accountant Stormy Daniels’ or ‘housewife Stormy Daniels’ have ever been printed? No, it was salacious and used against me and used to ruin my credibility.”
But, she says, it has also sometimes worked in her favour. “Because I couldn’t be shamed. I couldn’t be threatened with nude photos — they are everywhere,” she cackles.
Her childhood and early years, she expects, will be revisited in depth in a forthcoming documentary, produced by Judd Apatow (whom she has known since her cameos in The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up) and set for release early next year. “I could see it next week and be like, ‘Oh my God, I love it.’ I could see it and be like, ‘Oh God, what have I done?’ It does open a lot of old wounds.”
A critic might observe that a new podcast and a documentary do not look like the actions of a woman keen to keep a lower profile. But Daniels still feels impelled to put across her side of things. “And the book ended in July 2018, and so much crazy stuff has happened since 2018,” she says.
The day before we speak, New York Magazine publishes a story that, were a US presidential election to be called tomorrow, according to current polls Trump would beat Biden resoundingly. “It’s terrifying,” says Daniels. “How is there no rule that you can’t be president from jail? Oh, because we never thought in a million years that could possibly ever be a thing.”
Were Trump to be re-elected…? “We’re leaving,” says Blade, who has wandered in to order a pizza. “Everyone said that last time,” cautions Daniels. “We’re leaving the country,” maintains Blade.
Like many, Daniels is mystified by how close Trump came to re-election in 2020, and his current lead in the polls. “I think maybe because he’s not a career politician, and he gives zero f***s — he speaks his mind, no matter how vulgar or offensive it might be — and there are people in this country who feel like they’ve never been represented, and that he’s perhaps the closest they feel they’ve had.”
How she would cope with the prospect of seeing Trump inaugurated again is one topic on which Daniels is uncharacteristically lost for words. “I don’t know,” she says, shaking her head. “These are questions I ask myself every day.”
A keen tarot reader and medium, she also refuses to give predictions on the presidential race. “I don’t want to challenge the universe,” she says.
So, in the meantime, she pushes on, writing and directing adult films. Her latest, Redemption, she tells me, has just received 17 nominations for the AVN adult film awards. “Not bad for a ‘washed-up porn star’, right?” she quips.
She’s also directed a non-adult short film, Decoy, and would like to do more. “I’m not trying to do Michael Bay or Disney movies, just tell good stories.”
I think a Disney film directed by Daniels would be quite a coup, I say. She laughs throatily. “I think that would be the only thing more absurd than Donald Trump becoming president again.”
Episode one of Beyond the Norm with Stormy Daniels is available now, with new episodes released weekly, on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Written by: Jane Mulkerrins
© The Times of London