‘I swatted him right on the butt’: Key takeaways from ‘honeybunch’ Stormy Daniels’ testimony at Trump trial
In perhaps the most explosive day of testimony to date, Stormy Daniels went into intricate detail about her alleged sexual encounter with the former president
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Stormy Daniels’ hotly anticipated testimony in Donald Trump’s hush money trial finally got under way in a Manhattan courtroom on Tuesday, with the adult film star revealing intimate details about the alleged affair at the heart of the case.
The Manhattan jurors and Mr Trump alike sat, rapt, listening as she testified about how her meeting with the then-60-year-old real estate mogul at a celebrity golf tournament turned sexual.
Her testimony was so detailed — providing comments about everything from what the floor tiles looked like to Mr Trump’s Hugh Hefner-like pajamas — that the judge warned her to stop including any “unnecessary narrative.”
In the afternoon, the defense team also took issue with Ms Daniels’ testimony, calling for a mistrial. The judge denied the request.
For almost four hours on the 13th day of his hush money trial, Mr Trump was forced to listen to her memory of the romantic liaison that ultimately led to his alleged criminal activity.
The former president is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records related to a $130,000 payment to Ms Daniels before the 2016 presidential election in exchange for her keeping quiet over their alleged 2006 affair.
Here are the key takeaways from the dramatic day in court:
‘Does Mr Hefner know you stole his pajamas?’
Ms Daniels told the court how she met Mr Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe in July 2006 and, after the day’s event, she was invited to dinner with him.
She testified that she had been given “specific instructions to take a certain elevator to the penthouse” suite in the hotel where he was staying.
There, Mr Trump’s bodyguard Keith Schiller was standing outside. “Have a nice evening, you look nice,” Mr Schiller said, according to her testimony.
She walked inside and waited in the foyer, the floor of which as covered in black and white tiles, she recalled.
Ms Daniels called out “Hello?” and Mr Trump approached her “wearing silk or satin pajamas,” she testified.
“Does Mr Hefner know you stole his pajamas?” she recalled joking, referring to then-Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner.
Ms Daniels testified that she asked him to change and he “obliged”.
‘Honeybunch’
The adult film star testified that the pair had a two hour-long casual chat inside his hotel suite, including discussing The Apprentice and Ms Daniels talking about her evolution from adult film star to director.
During the encounter, Mr Trump gave Ms Daniels a romantic nickname: “Honeybunch.”
‘You remind me of my daughter’
At some point in the conversation, Ms Daniels recalled Mr Trump telling her: “You remind me of my daughter – smart, blonde and beautiful. And people underestimate her as well.”
Ms Daniels didn’t name which daughter Mr Trump was referring to.
However, this isn’t the first time that an alleged former lover of has claimed he has compared them to his daughter.
Former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who was also given a so-called hush money payment to silence her about an alleged affair with the former president, has previously said he compared her to Ivanka.
‘I swatted him right on the butt’
As they chatted, Ms Daniels testified that she grew annoyed with Mr Trump’s “arrogance”, telling the court that he always seemed to try to “one-up” her and to talk about himself.
She recalled telling him: “Are you always this rude? You don’t even know how to have a conversation?”
Ms Daniels testified that “he seemed to be taken aback by that”.
The adult film star then said she “swatted him right on the butt” with a rolled-up Forbes magazine. After that, he was “much more polite,” she told the court.
Melania and Trump ‘don’t even sleep in the same room’
Mr Trump’s relationship with his wife Melania also came up in conversation that night, Ms Daniels testified.
She told the court that Mr Trump showed her a photo of Melania but told her not to worry about her.
“Don’t worry about that,” he said, according to Ms Daniels. “We don’t even sleep in the same room.”
At the time of the alleged sexual encounter, Mr Trump and Melania were newlyweds, having married about a year and a half earlier in January 2005. The couple’s son Barron Trump was born in March 2006 – just four months before the alleged affair.
Although Mr Trump had initially asked the adult film star to get dinner with him, that dinner never happened, she testified.
Ms Daniels told the court that she came back from the restroom to find Mr Trump lying horizontally on the bed in boxers and a t-shirt.
“At first I was just startled, like a jump scare,” she testified. “I felt the blood leave my hands and my feet, almost like standing up too fast. ... I just thought, ‘Oh my god, What did I misread to get here?’ The intention was pretty clear.”
Ms Daniels even posed to show what Mr Trump looked like on the bed to jurors, placing one hand on her head and one hand on her hip.
Ms Daniels testified that Mr Trump did not wear a condom when they slept together.
Afterwards, she said he told her: “That was great. Let’s get together, honeybunch.”
Failed mistrial bid
While the court was taking a lunch break, Mr Trump took to Truth Social to demand a mistrial.
“THE PROSECUTION, WHICH HAS NO CASE, HAS GONE TOO FAR. MISTRIAL!,” the former president wrote.
When the court proceedings resumed, his defense attorney Todd Blanche followed up on his call, saying that he was “regrettably” seeking a mistrial.
Mr Blanche took issue with Ms Daniels’ explosive testimony, arguing that aside from “pure embarrassment,” the porn star’s testimony is intended “to inflame this jury to not look at the evidence that matters but just here from this witness”.
The defense attorney added: “It’s extraordinarily prejudicial to insert safety concerns into a trial about business records.”
If there were to be a new trial, Ms Daniels’ testimony should be excluded from it, Mr Blanche told the judge.
Prosecutor Susan Hoffinger disputed this, explaining that Ms Daniels’ entire story about their alleged tryst is “precisely” what Trump didn’t want made public before the 2016 election – something that ultimately led to the hush money payments at the heart of the case. “This is not a new account,” she added, since most of the adult film star’s testimony was already in the public eye.
The judge subsequently denied Mr Trump’s request for a mistrial. However, Judge Juan Merchan said he was surprised that the defense hadn’t objected to more of Ms Daniels’ testimony, adding: “The remedy is on cross examination.”
The judge also told Ms Daniels to stay focused on answering the questions and avoid providing any “unnecessary narrative”.
Stormy Daniels was ‘ashamed’ after affair with Trump
While the whole world now knows about the alleged affair, Ms Daniels told the court that at the time she felt “ashamed” and barely told anyone.
“I told very few people that we had actually had sex,” she testified.
“I felt ashamed that I didn’t stop it, that I didn’t say no.”
Stormy Daniels feared for her safety
In 2011, five years after the alleged sexual encounter, Ms Daniels testified that she was approached by In TouchWeekly to tell her story.
She agreed to give an interview because she’d “rather make the money than someone make money off me” and “could try to control the narrative,” she told the court.
Ms Daniels was offered $15,000, she said, noting that she had just given birth to her daughter and was not working at the time. The interview was short — just 10 or 20 minutes — and she didn’t divulge all the details, she testified.
Then, in January 2011 in Las Vegas, she testified that a man approached her in a parking lot while she was walking to a mommy-and-me workout class with her daughter, and “threatened me to not continue to tell my story”.
She didn’t tell the police “because he told me not to say anything and I was scared”.
The magazine didn’t run the story (until 2018) and Ms Daniels was never paid. She testified that she later learned that Cohen threatened to sue the magazine if it published the bombshell piece.
Flash forward to 2016, when Ms Daniel’s publicist told her that Michael Cohen and then-presidential candidate Mr Trump were interested in buying her story. But she didn’t want the story out in public, she said.
The adult film star said she didn’t negotiate the dollar figure, as money wasn’t her concern. Instead, she was motivated out of “fear” to ensure the affair story would be buried and so agreed to the hush money payment.
“I was afraid if it wasn’t done before the nominations and things that it wasn’t safe and he wouldn’t pay. … The election, is what I meant to say,” she said on the stand.
Ms Daniels revealed there was a four-day deadline to pay her — and it was late.
The delay made her concerned. She was concerned that, if Mr Trump won and “got what he wanted,” she would continue to feel unsafe with her story out there, she testified.
The $130,000, explained
Ms Daniels testified about the now-infamous $130,000 payment from Mr Trump’s then-personal attorney Michael Cohen — the payment at the heart of the ongoing criminal trial.
The court was shown an email from her lawyer Keith Davidson to Cohendated 11 October 2016 that laid out the terms of the agreement.
She said it included a list of eight names that Ms Daniels provided — the friends that she had told about her alleged affair.
Mr Davidson received the $130,000 from Cohen, she testified. Mr Davidson and her publicist collected their fees and then Ms Daniels collected $96,000, she said.
A chat with Gloria Allred
During a tense cross-examination, Ms Daniels was confronted by defense attorney Susan Necheles about her interaction with prominent lawyer Gloria Allred.
In her book Full Disclosure, Ms Daniels wrote that her publicist arranged a phone call for her to speak with Ms Allred in 2011.
“You told her that you did not have sex with Trump?” Ms Necheles asked Ms Daniels.
“No that’s incorrect, I told her that I did,” the adult film star replied.
Ms Necheles pointed out that Ms Daniels omitted the alleged affair with Mr Trump in her phone conversation with Ms Allred.
Ms Daniels explained that she spoke about that part later with her in person.
But Ms Necheles pressed that the phone call had ended with Ms Allred asking if there was “anything else,” to which Ms Daniels said there wasn’t.
“I did not trust her,” Ms Daniels told the court. “She wanted me to accuse him of forced… basically, rape.”
Ms Necheles then said: “You’re making this up as you sit there, right?”
Ms Daniels replied: “… No.” She explained: “I left out all of the details including the sex because she wanted to force me to say things that were not true.”
‘You hate President Trump?’
The cross-examination continued to get testy between the defense attorney and adult film star.
At one point, Ms Necheles pressed Ms Daniels about her thoughts on the former president — who the defense team insists on calling “president”.
Specifically, the defense attorney asked whether the porn star hated Mr Trump.
“Yes,” Ms Daniels told the court.
“And you want him to go to jail?” Ms Necheles then asked.
The key witness replied: “I want him to be held accountable.”
Ms Necheles asked her question again: “You want him to go to jail?”
“If he’s found guilty, absolutely,” Ms Daniels said.
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