When Donald J. Trump met Stormy Daniels, their flirtation seemed fleeting: He was a 60-year-old married mogul at the height of reality TV fame, and she was 27, not even half his age, a native of Louisiana who had grown up in poverty and was on the brink of pornographic stardom.
But that chance meeting in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, about 20 years ago set off a chain of events that has given the country its first criminal trial against a U.S. president.
And on Tuesday, Ms. Daniels took the stand at that trial, which brought the former president face-to-face with the porn star at the center of the case.
The charges stem from her story about having sex with Mr. Trump at that celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe in 2006, a story she was shopping around a decade later, during the final days of the presidential campaign. Mr. Trump's longtime lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, paid her $130,000 in hush money before Election Day, and the former president is accused of falsifying company documents to cover up the refunds for Mr. Cohen.
Ms. Daniels' rapid-fire testimony lasted nearly five hours, during which she described a meeting with Mr. Trump, now 77, that he has long denied. The courtroom was tense and her garrulous testimony filled a heavy silence. She joked; they didn't land.
After about half an hour on the stand, she began revealing intimate details about Mr. Trump, so much so that the judge denied some of the testimony. He suggested it was needlessly vulgar, and the defense demanded a mistrial.
Ms. Daniels said the future president invited her to dinner at his palatial hotel suite in Lake Tahoe. He answered the door in silk pajamas. When he was rude, she would playfully spank him with a rolled-up magazine. And when she asked about his wife, he told her not to worry, that they didn't even sleep in the same room — prompting Mr. Trump to shake his head in disgust and mutter “nonsense” to his lawyers.
Ms. Daniels then went on to recount the sex itself in graphic detail. It happened, she said, after she returned from the bathroom to find Mr. Trump in his boxers and T-shirt. She tried to leave and he blocked her way, but not, she said, in a threatening manner. The sex was short-lived, she said, and although she never said no, there was a “power imbalance.”
“I stared at the ceiling wondering how I got there,” she told the jury, adding that Mr Trump was not wearing a condom.
The testimony was an astonishing moment in American political history and a culmination of a trial full of them: a porn star, facing off against a former and possibly future president, telling the world what she was once paid to keep quiet about.
Ms. Daniels, 45, has told her story widely — to prosecutors, reporters, her friends, in a book — but never to jurors, and not with Mr. Trump in the room. Her appearance on the stand seemed to unnerve Mr. Trump as she aired his dirty laundry, under oath, in gruesome detail.
But Ms. Daniels' story isn't just a dirty kiss-and-tell story; it highlights what prosecutors say was Mr. Trump's criminality. He is accused of devising a false corporate records scheme to cover up all traces of their arrangement: the hush money, the payback to Mr. Cohen and, yes, the sex.
While the defense blasted the testimony as a libel, Ms. Daniels provided prosecutors with some helpful details. She captured the basic story of her meeting with Mr. Trump. And she testified that she would have told the same uncomfortable story in 2016 had she not taken the hush money from Trump's fixer.
But her testimony at times seemed problematic to the prosecutors who called her. Ms. Daniels testified that money was not her motivation, and that she wanted to go public with her story. That could raise skepticism among jurors, who have heard that she accepted the $130,000 and in return did not tell her story for more than a year.
“My motivation wasn't money,” she said. “It was motivated by fear, not money.”
The jury also saw the judge, Juan M. Merchan, berate Ms. Daniels at least twice and order her to comply with the questions she was asked. At one point, he even raised his own objection, interrupting her testimony when she began describing the sexual position she and Mr. Trump were in.
Judge Merchan, generally a stoic presence with a firm grip on his courtroom, showed rare exasperation as testimony veered in a nasty direction and the trial took on a circus-like atmosphere.
He also asked Ms. Daniels to slow down. She was a fast talker, prone to laughter and long asides.
Outside the jury's presence, the judge acknowledged that “there are some things better left unsaid” in her testimony and suggested Ms Daniels may have had “credibility issues”.
Still, he rejected the defense's bid for a mistrial and instead invited Trump's lawyers to aggressively question Ms. Daniels.
“The more times this story is changed, the more fodder for cross-examination,” he said.
Susan Necheles, the Trump lawyer who conducted the cross-examination, followed the judge's advice.
She painted Mrs. Daniels as a lying opportunist. She has unearthed excerpts from Ms. Daniels' book that suggest her story has changed over time. And in a potentially awkward moment for Ms. Daniels, Ms. Necheles suggested she had made up a story about a Trump supporter threatening her and her daughter in a Las Vegas parking lot, a story she did not share with her baby's father.
“Your daughter's life was in danger and you didn't tell her father, right?” Ms. Necheles asked, implying the story was fake.
Mrs. Daniels was outraged. And under cross-examination, she parried effectively and even outperformed with her answers to prosecutors.
Her testimony brought full circle one of the first scandals to emerge from Trump's presidency. Since The Wall Street Journal broke the news six years ago that Mr. Cohen had paid her to keep quiet, her story has changed the course of American politics and laid the foundation for the case.
Over the years, Ms. Daniels has relied on her Trump-adjacent fame. She has sold merchandise, filmed a documentary, conducted high-profile interviews and written a book so telling that it included detailed descriptions of the former president's genitals. Trump has also made insults that ridiculed her appearance, calling her “horse face.”
But at other times, Ms. Daniels seemed tortured, describing the personal toll of excessive exposure. Suddenly she was not just a porn star, but a threat to a man leading the most fervent political movement in modern American history. She told reporters she was inundated with threats from Trump supporters, many of them explicit. She feared for her family and divorced her third husband, the father of her daughter.
“I've just been tormented for the past five years,” she said in the opening scene of “Stormy.” documentary about her life that was released on Peacock. “And here I am, I'm still here.”
Ms. Daniels joined the process at a crucial time. On Monday, prosecutors had asked two veterans of the Trump Organization's accounting department to show jurors the 34 documents they say Trump falsified to conceal his reimbursement to Cohen for the hush money. These include 11 invoices, 11 checks and 12 entries in Mr. Trump's ledger, which portrayed the payments as normal legal fees.
In the coming weeks, Mr. Cohen is expected to take the stand and connect the dots between the salacious details and the substantive documents. On Tuesday, Ms. Daniels' testimony took jurors through the seedier elements of the case.
She began by recounting a difficult childhood in Baton Rouge. Her parents separated when she was young, she said.
She wanted to become a veterinarian and was editor of her high school newspaper. She eventually started stripping, she says, because she earned more money than shoveling manure onto a horse stable.
By the time she met Mr. Trump at the 2006 golf tournament, she was in porn. She was an actress and would eventually find her way as a director and producer.
When asked in court to identify Mr. Trump, she referred to him as the man in a navy blue suit jacket. Ms. Daniels, dressed all in black and wearing glasses, reduced the unique former president to just another man in the courtroom.
She spent much of her testimony describing that first meeting in Lake Tahoe. When she met Mr. Trump, she knew he was a golfer and the host of “The Apprentice,” the reality show that revived Mr. Trump's celebrity for a new generation. In one memorable sentence, Mrs. Daniels said she also knew he was “the same age or older than my father.”
Later that day, she said, Trump's aide came over and invited her to dinner. She says he took her number down, but her first reaction was “eff no,” short for an expletive.
But her publicist encouraged her: “What could go wrong?”
She then transported jurors to his hotel room, painted the expansive suite in meticulous detail, capturing every aspect down to the color of the tiles.
She said Trump had expressed interest in her company and asked about unions, residuals and health insurance, as well as testing for sexually transmitted diseases. “He was very interested in how I transitioned from being a porn star to writing and directing,” she said.
Ms. Daniels said Mr. Trump told her, “You remind me of my daughter.” She's smart and blonde and beautiful, and people underestimate her, too.”
She remembered going to the bathroom to put on her lipstick, where she said she saw gold tweezers and Old Spice.
They stayed in touch later, she said. In 2007, they met at Trump Tower in New York, at a Trump Vodka launch party in Los Angeles and at a hotel in Beverly Hills — all interactions that seemed to undermine Trump's claims that he barely knew her.
The jury was also shown contact logs from Ms. Daniels' phone and from the phone of Mr. Trump's aide, which showed they kept in touch. And when they did talk, she said, Mr. Trump had a nickname for her: “honeybunch.”
Since then, they have only spoken through lawyers, mainly during the hush money negotiations. When Ms. Necheles accused Ms. Daniels of using this effort to “extort money from President Trump,” Ms. Daniels objected.
“False,” she said.
“That's what you did, right?” Mrs. Necheles persisted.
“False!” Mrs. Daniels screamed.
Reporting was contributed by William K. Rashbaum, Kate Christobek, Jesse McKinley And Wesley Parnell.