A riveting courtroom battle played out at Donald Trump’s hush money trial Tuesday over the motives, and morals, of one of the case’s main characters: porn star Stormy Daniels.
Prosecutors sought to portray her as an entrepreneurial, three-dimensional woman defying stereotypes of the adult film industry. Trump’s defense team presented a much less flattering picture of her as an extortionist and liar eager to cash in on an unlikely brush with fame.
Officially, the audience for the tense exchanges that sometimes approached shouting was the jury of seven men and five women seated in the shabby, 15th-floor courtroom in lower Manhattan. But the packed gallery, the intense security and the TV trucks outside were all reminders that Trump’s potential political liability in the case is at least as significant as his legal exposure.
For about three hours, prosecutor Susan Hoffinger sought to convince the jury — and the broader audience — that Daniels is far more than the image conjured by tabloid headlines.
Hoffinger met the formidable challenge of trying to render a porn star relatable by stressing her protectiveness of her daughter, her work on movies and music videos outside the pornography industry, the three books she has written and even a flirtation with a 2009 Senate candidacy in Louisiana.
Daniels bluntly described her entry into the adult entertainment industry as an exotic dancer at age 17 as a simple question of dollars and cents. “I could still make more in two nights than I did shoveling manure eight hours a day,” she said, a reference to how she toiled on a horse farm.
It took only about 15 minutes before Daniels was asked to address the elephant in the room: her encounter with Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, where she claims she had sex with him in 2006. She said she knew little about him at the time, except that he had a TV show she had never seen.
Daniels said the celebrity golfers met her and several other porn stars from the same studio at a photo line at the event. Upon hearing that she’d directed some films, Trump was quick to comment on her intellect, she said.
“You direct, too? You must be the smart one,” Daniels recalled Trump saying at their first brief meeting. After another brief encounter where he again called her “smart,” Daniels said she heard from Trump’s then-bodyguard that the real estate mogul wanted to meet her for dinner.
Stormy spoke. Trump fumed. Jurors were captivated — but also cringed. – POLITICO