Stormy Daniels Testifies, Trump Curses in An Angry Day in Court

The Washington Post / Devlin Barrett, Tom Jackman, Shayna Jacobs, Marianne LeVine

16:20 JST, May 8, 2024

Stormy Daniels, the adult-film actress at the center of Donald Trump’s hush money trial, testified Tuesday about a disturbing sexual encounter she says she had with him, leading to angry, profane muttering from the former president that alarmed the judge.

New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan called Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche to a sidebar during a midday break to say that Trump was “cursing audibly” and possibly intimidating Daniels, who had begun testifying, according to a trial transcript.

“I understand that your client is upset at this point,” Merchan said to the defense attorney, according to the transcript, “but he is cursing audibly and he is shaking his head visually and that’s contemptuous. It has the potential to intimidate the witness and the jury can see that.”

Blanche assured the judge he would speak to Trump.

“I am speaking to you here at the bench because I don’t want to embarrass him,” Merchan said. “You need to speak to him. I won’t tolerate that.”

The exchange punctuated a day of rage – sometimes whispered from the defense table, sometimes declared loudly by Daniels from the witness stand.

It was one of several surreal moments on the 13th day of the first criminal trial of a former U.S. president, including descriptions by Daniels of their alleged sexual encounter in 2006 that were so detailed that defense attorneys demanded a mistrial.

While Merchan rejected their request, Daniels at times seemed to be describing nonconsensual sex that could be considered highly prejudicial for the jury, which in turn could give Trump – the presumptive Republican presidential nominee – solid grounds to appeal if he is found guilty.

Trump is accused of 34 counts of falsifying business records for allegedly disguising financial transactions related to a $130,000 hush money payment made to Daniels in 2016 to keep her quiet about what she said happened between them. He has denied the charges and denied having sex with Daniels.

Speaking rapidly and often emphasizing her answers by pointing her finger in the air, Daniels insisted there was nothing about the years of bad blood between her and Trump that made her story untrue. Still, her dislike of the defendant was palpable in the courtroom.

Daniels described meeting Trump at a golf event in Lake Tahoe, Calif., and being invited to his hotel suite that night.

When she got there, she talked with the reality TV star for a couple of hours, but then to her surprise she emerged from the bathroom to find him wearing a T-shirt and boxers and posing on the bed, Daniels said.

“That’s when I had that moment when I felt like the room spun in full motion. And I felt the blood leave my hands and my feet, almost like if you stand up too fast,” she testified. Trump “stood up between me and the door, not in a threatening manner,” though she said she felt an imbalance of power, particularly with Trump’s security guard outside.

“I think I blacked out,” Daniels said, adding that there were many details she didn’t remember but insisting that she wasn’t drugged or drunk.

“Next thing I know I was on the bed,” she testified. “I was staring at the ceiling. I didn’t know how I got there.”

She said the encounter was brief.

Before Daniels testified, Trump’s lawyers had argued that it would be unfair to tell the jury salacious details about an alleged sexual encounter that is not part of the charges against him.

Merchan warned prosecutor Susan Hoffinger not to go into great detail about the alleged encounter, but the prosecutor elicited not only a lengthy description of a sexual experience that often did not sound consensual, but also a raft of other details, down to the brand of shampoo in his bathroom, Pert Plus.

Trump’s lawyers complained bitterly that Daniels’s account of a possible sex crime had hopelessly tainted the jury against him and asked for a mistrial.

“All of this has nothing to do with this case, is extraordinarily prejudicial and the only reason why the government asked those questions, besides pure embarrassment, is to inflame this jury to not look at the evidence that matters,” Blanche said.

Prosecutors said the jury needed to know the underlying details of Daniels’s alleged encounter with Trump to understand why he would be motivated to pay money to keep it quiet. And the specifics, they said, would boost her credibility after it has been attacked by Trump’s lawyers.

Merchan rejected the defense’s request for a mistrial, saying that while Daniels had talked too fast and gone into greater detail than he would like, that was partly the defense’s fault for not objecting more strenuously.

“There are some things that are probably better left unsaid,” Merchan said. “I think there were some things that I think the witness was a little difficult to control. … It was not easy.”

The judge defended his own role during the testimony, saying he had done “everything that I can possibly do to protect both sides.”

Before Daniels was brought back to testify, he instructed the prosecutor to speak to her and make it clear that she needed to speak slower, and only answer the questions she was asked.

The fight over Daniels’s testimony comes weeks after the same prosecutor’s office suffered a stinging defeat when New York’s highest court tossed out their 2020 conviction of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, saying the trial judge had improperly allowed too much testimony about uncharged sexual misconduct. In the Trump case, Merchan has insisted that the ruling has no bearing on the current trial.

While Tuesday’s testimony could give Trump a meaty appeals issue should he be convicted, that process typically takes years and would be worth far less politically than a win at trial.

Outside the courtroom, Trump told reporters that the day featuring Daniels had blown up in the prosecutors’ faces.

“This was a very big day, a very revealing day as you see their case is totally falling apart,” he said. “They have nothing on books and records and even something that should bear very little relationship to the case. It’s just a disaster for the D.A. … this whole case is just a disaster.”

Trump’s angry demonstrations from the defense table were not the first time he has upset a trial judge. The federal judge overseeing his civil trial earlier this year threatened to expel him from the courtroom after he audibly disparaged his sexual assault accuser E. Jean Carroll, who successfully sued him for defamation.

On Tuesday afternoon, Trump lawyer Susan Necheles challenged Daniels’s shifting accounts of what happened, suggesting she was willing to say whatever got her paid. In 2011, Daniels acknowledged, she had tried and failed to sell her story of meeting Trump for $15,000.

At times she has publicly denied that the two had sex, but on the witness stand, Daniels insisted that those were lies told to live up to the terms of the nondisclosure agreement which paid her $130,000.

Necheles suggested that the main lesson Daniels learned from the 2011 experience was that she would have to make up a story about having sex with Trump if she wanted to make money.

“Am I correct that you hate President Trump … and you want him to go to jail, right?” Necheles asked, pointing to an old social media post in which Daniels said she would dance down the street if he were locked up.

“I want him to be held accountable,” Daniels replied.

“You’re looking to get, extort, money from President Trump, right?” the defense lawyer asked.

“False,” Daniels countered, though she later conceded that she was interested in making money, and insisted there was nothing wrong with that.

“To be quite honest, if I had a chance to get the story out and make some money, yes,” she said.

She also acknowledged that, as a result of losing some civil cases against Trump and being ordered to pay his legal fees, she owes Trump more than $660,000.

Necheles wondered whether that debt was motivation for Daniels to publicly accuse Trump. Daniels admitted tweeting that she would go to jail before she paid Trump.

“You’ve chosen to disobey a court order?” Necheles asked Daniels. “I’ve chosen not to pay,” Daniels said.