Pornographic actress Stormy Daniels and United States President Donald Trump (GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/Ethan Miller)
In July 2006, reality TV star Donald Trump bumped into a porn star at a celebrity golf tournament near Lake Tahoe in the American West.
Just 60 years old, the future president of the United States, who has just had a son with his wife Melania, poses, in a yellow polo shirt and red cap, alongside the buxom Stormy Daniels — Stephanie Clifford in the city — then 27 years old.
The rest is disputed: the energetic blonde assures that they spent the night together (and does not keep a fond memory of it), denies him any sexual relationship and accuses him of being a “scammer”.
Whatever happened in Nevada, the former stripper received $130,000 just before the 2016 presidential election to remain silent on this meeting.
This payment could make Donald Trump become the first ex-president criminally charged in all of American history: the Republican billionaire expects to be “arrested” on Tuesday by the justice of the State of New York who suspects him of for having violated the law on the financing of electoral campaigns.
The news was greeted with irony by Stormy Daniels, who brought out the nickname “Little Thing” for the occasion, which she has given her since he renamed her “Horse face” on social networks.
– “Pitbull” –
The tone between the two has, according to the porn star, not always been so acrid.
To seduce her in 2006, he told her he found her “special” and dangled her for a role in his show “The Apprentice”, which never materialized despite subsequent contacts, she says. .
In 2011, Stormy Daniels tried for the first time to sell these details to people magazine In Touch for 15,000 dollars. The title, however, gives up publishing the interview after being threatened with legal action by Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen.
According to the actress, a stranger then approached her in a Las Vegas parking lot to intimidate her and order her to “forget about Trump”.
She complied until the real estate magnate won the 2016 Republican primary. She then resumed contact with the media to try to monetize her story.
Michael Cohen, then nicknamed Donald Trump’s “pitbull”, returns to the stage to buy his silence, as he has already done for playmate Karen McDougal in a comparable setting.
His boss is already weakened by an old audio recording in which he boasts of being able to “catch” women “by the pussy”, and the scandal should not be fueled.
After negotiations, the lawyer pays 130,000 dollars out of his pocket to Stormy Daniels as part of a confidentiality agreement signed on October 28 under the pseudonyms “Peggy Peterson” and “David Dennison”.
– ‘Give America back its excitement’ –
Donald Trump is elected, the months pass and the case could have ended there, if the very serious daily Wall Street Journal had not revealed the transaction in January 2018.
At first, Michael Cohen covers the president and ensures that he has never been reimbursed. Stormy Daniels visits her on a television set, but is content with embarrassed laughter.
However, as early as March, she asked the courts to overturn the confidentiality agreement and began touring the media and strip clubs with a tour called “Make America Excited” (“Make America Horny Again”).
In October, she released an autobiography “Full disclosure”, in which she claimed that her night with Donald Trump “was the least impressive” of her life and described her sex in an unflattering way.
Beyond the devastation in terms of image, and the coldness that Melania seems to show him, the situation is complicated on the legal level for Donald Trump.
Targeted by several investigations for fraud, Michael Cohen turns his jacket around and agrees to cooperate with the investigators. In August 2018, he notably admitted having made the payment “at the request” of Trump.
Meanwhile, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who has joined the president’s team of lawyers, got his feet wet by admitting, live on Fox, that the Trump Organization did pay Michael back. Cohen.
Trump is forced to admit the payment but assures, on Twitter, that he did not use “campaign money”.
In four years of proceedings, however, he never agreed to testify before New York prosecutors, of whom we will soon know what they think.
