Culture

Stormy Daniels Claims She Kept Quiet On Her Alleged Trump Affair Out Of Fear For Her Safety

For over two months, Stormy Daniels’ alleged 2006 affair with Donald Trump has made headlines due to the absurdity of the scandal. Not only is Daniels’ business booming as a result, but Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, has made matters worse for his client regarding the $130,000 hush agreement that has culminated (despite a $20 million lawsuit) with Sunday night’s 60 Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper. The talk contained multiple illuminating moments, but at the top of the list was the reason why Daniels stayed quiet and repeatedly denied that the affair happened.

That is to say, in May 2011, Daniels sold her account to In Touch, and that interview was subsequently killed. Daniels told Cooper that she signed the NDA (in 2016) for a mere $130,000 because she feared for her safety and that of her daughter after someone approached her in a parking lot and (as previously alluded to by Daniels’ attorney, Michael Avenatti) threatened her:

“I was in a parking lot, going to a fitness class with my infant daughter. T– taking, you know, the seats facing backwards in the backseat, diaper bag, you know, gettin’ all the stuff out. And a guy walked up on me and said to me, ‘Leave Trump alone. Forget the story.’ And then he leaned around and looked at my daughter and said, ‘That’s a beautiful little girl. It’d be a shame if something happened to her mom.’ And then he was gone.”

Daniels then told Cooper that she “absolutely” took this as a “direct threat,” and she never went to the police because she was terrified. She then agreed to be quiet because she was “concerned for my family and their safety.” Fifteen months later (in January 2018), Daniels signed what she admitted was an “untruthful” statement that she hadn’t disavowed the affair because of the payment but “because it never happened.” Daniels told Cooper that she lied because she feared legal repercussions and how “they” (she thought this was Michael Cohen) “can make your life hell in many different ways.”

At the start of the interview, Daniels revealed that she was not attracted to Trump at all but that their (alleged) sex (without a condom) was entirely consensual, and she “thought of it as a business deal.” Here, Stormy talks about how she broke the ice during her first encounter with Trump by playfully spanking him with a copy of Forbes magazine

The interview also featured cutaways by Cooper discussing how the hush money, which was paid during the Trump campaign by Cohen, might actually have violated individual campaign contribution levels. (And this could actually drag the Stormy mess into Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.) You can read the full 60 Minutes interview transcript here.

It also must be noted that, during tonight’s event, Melania Trump remained at Mar-a-Lago (out of “tradition”) while Trump returned alone to D.C. And last week, Avenatti tweeted this teaser image of a CD-ROM disk, which he suggested might contain a photo that Trump didn’t want the world to see, but no further elaboration occurred from Stormy on that note.

(Via CBS News, Page Six & Michael Avenatti on Twitter)

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