Adult film star Stormi Daniels has built a lucrative business empire around her alleged sexual encounter with Donald Trump and gained hordes of fans for her quick retorts to those who call her an immoral woman.
The alleged meeting is now at the center of the first criminal trial of an American president in United States history, which began yesterday in Manhattan. Trump is required to attend the trial, which will continue in May. The selection of 12 jurors will take about a week, followed by the hearing of witnesses, Reuters reported.
Trump is accused of concealing his $130.000 fee to former lawyer Michael Cowen to pay Daniels to buy her silence before the 2016 election about the alleged sexual encounter, which took place while he was already married to his now third wife, Melania.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business documents to conceal the payment, and he denies the meeting ever took place.
Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, announced on social media that she expects to be a witness for the prosecution. Trump's lawyers unsuccessfully tried to block her testimony, claiming she would tell "fabrications."
Daniels, 45, has embraced her role as the key challenger to Republican challenger Democratic President Joe Biden in the Nov. 5 election.
In a documentary series that began airing March 18 on Peacock, Daniels said being at the center of the scandal and often the target of vicious attacks by Trump supporters online took an emotional toll on her.
However, this did not prevent her from often mocking Trump as well as critics of her profession, the British agency points out.
"A big network invested a lot of money to make a documentary about me and I'm going to testify against the little guy," he wrote in an apparent allusion to Trump in a Feb. 6 social media post.
“Look at me. I'm living the American dream while doing a job I love," Daniels wrote in response to the insults of an X network user.
The sensational nature of the case has drawn criticism across the political spectrum that the charges brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's office are not as serious as other state and federal criminal cases against Trump, which focus on his efforts to reverse his 2020 election defeat and his handling of government documents.
Bragg said that this is a case about Trump's alleged plan to use corruption during the 2016 election, and it is the only one that will have a judicial epilogue until the November 5 election.
Daniels is a writer, director and media personality. In 2020, she launched her reality television show “Spooky Babes,” in which she searches haunted houses as a “paranormal investigator,” and once flirted with a run for the U.S. Senate as a Democrat-turned-Republican.
She said that her childhood was marked by sexual assault and poverty. Growing up in Louisiana with a single mother, “we were just scum. My mother was a wreck, my clothes didn't fit, I was poor and I smelled," Daniels told Vice News in 2021.
She said that she was an excellent student and edited the school newspaper in high school when she left home and began doing striptease to support herself.
She continued working in the adult entertainment industry after graduating from high school and began her career in adult films in 2002. Daniels soon started winning awards in the porn industry and was getting roles in television shows and movies.
Prosecutors allege that the payment to Daniels in October 2016 came after a leaked tape on "Access Hollywood" showed Trump bragging about forcing himself on women, saying that as a celebrity he could "catch them by the piss" (he later claimed that these are only men's stories).
That video fueled fears about his standing with women during the campaign, prosecutors said.
Trump's lawyers argue that he paid Daniels to spare himself, his company and his family humiliation, not to help his campaign.
Daniels is married to a fellow porn actor and has a daughter and a horse farm. In the documentary on the Peacock Network, Daniels learns that her daughter is getting all A's in school while she is taping an interview about Trump shortly after he was indicted last year.
"Instead of being there with her," Danielsova said, "I'm here talking about the former president's penis."
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