The Real Reason Stormy Daniels Took Hush Money From Donald Trump

From Stormy Daniels’s perspective, there was one obvious reason to accept the hush-money payment from Donald Trump: take it, or be killed.

The danger posed by Trump and his associates in the aftermath of their affair was clear for the adult film star, whose problems with Trump began in 2006 when he slept with her after dangling a potential spot on The Celebrity Apprentice. Soon after, Trump sent his former fixer, Michael Cohen, to pay her $130,000 to stay quiet about their entanglement ahead of his 2016 bid for the presidency.

In a new documentary that intimately follows Daniels’s side of their ensuing, yearslong legal battle, Daniels explains that she knew she had become a target after Trump’s political career began: The Republican Party, she says, likes “to make their problems go away.”

“I mean, people have been suspiciously killed for political reasons. It was really about two things: trying to keep the story from coming out so that it would not hurt my husband and my daughter, and I wouldn’t lose my life, and that there would be a paper trail and money trail linking me to Donald Trump so that he could not have me killed. All I had to do was sign this piece of paper and collect $130,000,” Daniels explains in Stormy.

But it wasn’t just political paranoia getting the better of her. Even before Daniels attempted to break the nondisclosure agreement that Trump had forced her into, she endured brutal bullying that, at times, threatened not just her life but also that of her child. Stormy also documents a 2011 incident in which she was approached by a strange man in Las Vegas who she claimed threatened her daughter while demanding she forget about her tryst with Trump. Daniels also shared footage of her tailing and calling the cops on an unidentified man in a car who she said she had caught videotaping and following her daughter.

Elsewhere in the documentary, Daniels—whose real name is Stephanie Clifford—reveals that she had recorded a video will in the event that she was murdered. She instructed the filmmaker whom she had quietly hired to follow her around to promise to hand the footage to a news station in the event of her death and split the proceeds 50/50 with her child.

Daniels’s next starring role will be in Trump’s New York hush-money trial, in which the GOP presidential nominee faces 34 felony counts related to falsifying business records to cover up the payments—which may have helped swing the 2016 election. Trump had previously attempted to keep Daniels, along with Cohen, far away from the trial on the basis that the two were “liars.” But on Tuesday, a judge nixed that effort, allowing them both to testify. The trial, which will be Trump’s first in a series of back-to-back criminal cases, is expected to begin sometime in mid-April.