Appearing Sunday night on CBS 60 Minutes, porn star Stormy Daniels added chilling and comical details to the seedy epic of her relationship with Donald Trump.
Speaking with correspondent Anderson Cooper, the porn star said she had remained silent for years about their affair because a strange man had threatened her life. Confirming an allegation made earlier by attorney Michael Avenatti, Daniels told Anderson Cooper that an unidentified male had delivered the Mafia-style warning in a Las Vegas parking lot seven years ago, while she held her infant daughter.
“A guy walked up on me and said to me, ‘Leave Trump alone. Forget the story,’ ” she recalled. “And then he leaned around and looked at my daughter and said, ‘That’s a beautiful little girl. It’d be a shame if something happened to her mom.’ And then he was gone.”
The threat came after she had agreed to talk about her relationship with the casino mogul in a tabloid magazine. She didn’t report the incident to the police out of fear, she said, and offered no other evidence to prove the threat had occurred.
As Cooper listened, Daniels explained how she had met Trump at a 2006 golf tournament, where he invited her to his room for dinner. In a moment of low comedy, she said that when he boasted too much about himself, she ordered him to drop his trousers and spanked him was a copy of Trump magazine, a vanity publication that featured his picture on the cover.
Later, when she emerged from using the bathroom, he was sitting on his bed and beckoned to her. That was when she realized that he expected sex, which she considered “punishment” for coming to his hotel room alone and getting herself into a “bad situation.”
“I realized exactly what I had gotten myself into. And I was like, ‘Ugh, here we go,’” she said. Although she wasn’t attracted to Trump, the sex was consensual and not a case of sexual harassment or assault, as alleged by other women who claim he victimized them. “I was not a victim,” said Daniels.
Indeed, that first evening was the only occasion when they were intimate, she told Cooper, and she regarded their relationship as “a business deal” that might lead to an appearance on Trump’s hit television show, The Apprentice — which he had promised in an apparent bid to entice her.
Over the following year, Trump called her often and she met with him a few more times, but avoided any further sexual encounters — even when he invited her to a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel for a business meeting that he clearly intended as an opportunity for seduction. A month later, he called to say she wouldn’t appear on his show, and she never saw him again.
Daniels admitted that last January, after the Wall Street Journal reported the payment of $130,000 in hush money from Trump Organization attorney Michael Cohen, she had lied in denying the affair. She agreed with Cooper’s suggestion that she has taken advantage of her sudden fame to profit from personal appearances at strip clubs. But she also insisted that she is telling the truth now, that nobody is paying her, and that her only motive is to “defend” herself against slurs on her motives and character.
On advice of counsel, she declined to discuss any images, text messages, or other evidence she may possess about her relationship with Trump.