Stormy Daniels, echoing Trump’s style, pushes back at lawyer’s attacks

NEW YORK – Donald Trump, the onetime president, and Stormy Daniels, the longtime porn actor, despise one another. But when Daniels returned to the witness stand at Trump’s criminal trial Thursday, his lawyers made them sound a lot alike.

He wrote more than a dozen self-aggrandizing books; she wrote a tell-all memoir. He mocked her appearance on social media; she fired back with a scatological insult. He peddled a $59.99 Bible; she hawked a $40 “Stormy, saint of indictments candle,” that carried her image draped in a Christ-like robe.

During Thursday’s grueling cross-examination, Trump’s lawyers sought to discredit Daniels as a money-grubbing extortionist who used a passing proximity to Trump to attain fame and riches. And yet, the more the defense assailed her self-promoting merchandise and online screeds, the more Daniels resembled the man she was testifying against: a master of marketing, a savant of social-media scorn.

“Not unlike Mr. Trump,” she said, though unlike him, she did it without the power and platform of the presidency.

Daniels’ appearance was a dramatic chapter in a theatrical proceeding, the first criminal trial of an American president.

Over nearly eight hours of searing testimony spread over two days, Daniels recounted in graphic detail her story of a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006. She described accepting a $130,000 payment in return for her silence during his first presidential campaign, the hush-money deal that underpins the 34 felony counts facing Trump, who is accused of falsifying records to cover the whole thing up. And, in the face of combative questions from his lawyers about subtle shifts in her story, she swung between defiance and vulnerability.

After a shaky performance on the stand earlier in the week, Daniels on Thursday conceded almost nothing. She had been frazzled. Now she was nimble as she volleyed with her questioner.

Susan Necheles, a lawyer for Trump, grilled Daniels about her account of a one-night stand at a celebrity golf tournament in Nevada: “You made all this up, right?”

Daniels responded with a forceful “no.”

When Necheles suggested that the porn actor had experience with “phony stories about sex,” Daniels responded that the sex in her films is “very much real, just like what happened to me in that room.” And when Necheles implied that her experience producing films showed that she knew how to spin fiction, Daniels replied, “I would have written it to be a lot better.”

Daniels, wearing a dark green dress and a black duster, showed a sensitive side at odds with the defense’s gold-digging portrayal. When a prosecutor asked her a final question – whether her experience with Trump had been a net positive or negative – she choked up.

“Negative,” Daniels said, barely getting the word out, and seeming on the verge of tears.

Trump’s lawyers managed to convey incredulity, noting that Daniels had denied the fling at various points. They unearthed inconsistencies, most notably Daniels’ insistence that she had wanted her story out in the world and had little interest in money. Necheles, spotlighting Daniels’ effort to sell the story to the media as well as Trump, suggested that in fact Daniels had shaken down Trump.

“That’s what you were asking in 2016, was for money, to be able to tell your story?” Necheles asked pointedly, adding, “That was your choice right?”

Daniels resisted, saying she “accepted an offer” from Trump’s fixer, Michael Cohen, in the waning days of the 2016 campaign because, she was “running out of time.”

But Necheles noted that she could have told her story for free. She pointed to evidence that Daniels had flirted with doing so but had abandoned discussions with a reporter from Slate magazine.

“You could have gone out any day of the week” and given a news conference, Necheles said, “but you chose not to, right?”

The defense chipped at Daniels’ credibility after she spent much of her earlier testimony describing an encounter with Trump in a Lake Tahoe, Nevada, hotel room in 2006.

In lurid detail – so much so that the judge scolded her Tuesday – Daniels painted the scene in that sprawling suite. She told jurors about the underwear Trump wore, the sexual position they assumed and his flirtatious chitchat likening her to his daughter: “She is smart and blond and beautiful, and people underestimate her as well.”

But Daniels’ two days of testimony, while striking, were something of a sideshow to the trial’s main event.

There is nothing illegal about a married man having sex with a porn actor, nor is it inherently criminal to pay a person for silence.

And Daniels knew little about the records that, according to prosecutors, crossed a legal line. The prosecutors have accused Trump of falsifying documents to cover up his repayment of Cohen for the $130,000 hush-money deal.

Yet Daniels offered jurors a first-person account of a tryst with Trump, helping prosecutors bolster belief in an incident that the former president has always denied, but that led to the payoff and the documents at the heart of the case.

Ultimately, the verdict could hang on Cohen’s testimony, which is expected in coming days, as well as the question of whether the jurors blame the prosecution or Trump for subjecting them to hours of squirm-inducing testimony.

For most of the cross-examination, Daniels appeared calm and controlled as she quibbled with the most trivial of facts. Although she occasionally seemed near tears, she never broke down, even when Necheles, with a hostile tone, accused her of capitalizing on her brush with Trump’s fame.

When Necheles displayed on the courtroom screens an advertisement for her strip club tour titled “Make America Horny Again,” Daniels said that she had hated that tagline.

When the defense played a recording of Daniels’ lawyer telling Cohen that she was desperate for money, Daniels denied saying anything of that nature.

And when Necheles accused Daniels of extortion, remarking “You were threatening to try to hurt” Trump “if he didn’t give you money,” the witness returned to one of her common refrains of the week: “False.”

Daniels noted that after paying expenses, including legal fees, she netted less than $100,000 from the hush money. And despite her vast array of online merchandise – including T-shirts and comic books, some aimed at the anti-Trump resistance – she said she was hardly rolling in cash.

“I haven’t actually made any profit. It covers my travel and my expenses and my security,” she explained as Trump leaned forward and stared at the screen that displayed the exhibits of her entrepreneurial efforts.

Daniels noted that she is hardly unique. Trump is himself a branding virtuoso and an evangelist for unbridled capitalism. He once wrote a book called “How to Get Rich.”

Confronted with her schoolyard insults aimed at the former president, she again cast him as the instigator.

He had belittled her appearance, calling her “horse face.” She mocked him as an “orange turd.”

“I’m not a human toilet,” she said Thursday, “so if they want to make fun of me, I can make fun of them.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.