Stormy Daniels’ star turn in court may have done more harm than good
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It wasn’t so much a collective gasp as a synchronised rattle.
Fingers furiously jabbed at keyboards as reporters crammed into the hard, wooden benches of courtroom 1530 desperately tried to capture every cough, splutter and indignant head shake.
“I had my clothes and shoes off. I believe my bra, however, was still on. We were in the missionary position”, Stormy Daniels, the former adult film actress, told the court, describing what she claims was a rather unpassionate night of passion with the former president of the United States.
Although Susan Necheles, Donald Trump’s defence lawyer, objected, Ms Daniels continued to divulge lurid details about that alleged night in a palatial hotel suite in 2006.
“Was he wearing a condom?” Susan Hoffinger, the prosecutor for the Manhattan district attorney’s office asked.
“No,” Ms Daniels, 45, replied.
Since the sound of Ms Daniels’ heels thwacking the grey, laminate floor reverberated around the Manhattan courtroom, dreary but relevant discussions about signing cheques and company ledgers had been superseded by racy details about the adult film industry and spanking Trump’s bottom.
Things escalated quickly.
But as the dust settled on a week when the trial suddenly came to life, experts were debating whether Ms Daniels had gone too far.
Over six hours and 10 minutes of testimony, which ran over two days, both the prosecution and defence raked over explicit detail about the alleged night in question.
Some of it raised the eyebrows of Judge Juan Merchan, who portrayed disbelief that crude descriptions of the alleged sexual encounter were spilling out into his courtroom.
The prosecution argued the jury needed to hear the details of what happened that night to bolster Ms Daniels’ credibility and show why Mr Trump was so desperate to keep them from becoming public days before the 2016 election.
But Randy Zelin, a professor at Cornell Law School, thinks the salacious details, which have nothing to do with the alleged 34 counts of falsifying business documents, will only damage the Manhattan district attorney’s office case.
“To get into intimate and graphic and just horrific detail… if I’m sitting there as a juror, I’m saying to myself: ‘You don’t have a case’,” he told The Telegraph.
“I’m thinking ‘all you want me to do is hate this man, all you want to do is dirty him and muddy him and denigrate him thinking that I’m stupid enough to take the bait and convict him because I think he’s a crappy person’.”
Ms Daniels leaned back in her maroon, leather chair for those six or so hours as she took the jury on a journey from life growing up in a “low income” household in Louisiana to meeting Mr Trump in the gift room at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe.
After accepting an invitation to join Mr Trump, 77, for dinner, sent via Keith Schiller, his bodyguard, Ms Daniels put on a pair of strappy, gold sandals and made her way to the penthouse suite at Harrah’s hotel.
Ms Daniels looked directly at the jury, at points giggling as though she was talking with friends over brunch, as she detailed everything she alleged happened behind that hotel-room door.
STI testing, whether adult actresses have unions and sleeping separate bedrooms from Melania Trump were all topics of conversation before Ms Daniels “swatted” Mr Trump “right on the butt” with a rolled-up magazine with his face on it, Ms Daniels claimed.
“Bull----”, Mr Trump said, writhing in his chair.
At points, Ms Daniels appeared to recount non-consensual sex. She “blacked out”, she said, before asserting that she had not been drugged or threatened. There was a “power imbalance”.
Describing seeing Mr Trump sitting on the bed in his boxers and a t-shirt, Ms Daniels said: “That’s when I had that moment where I felt the room spin in slow motion. I felt the blood basically leave my hands and my feet.”
Before their “very brief” sexual encounter, she claimed Mr Trump told her: “I thought we were getting somewhere… I thought you were serious about what you wanted. If you ever want to get out of that trailer park.”
Balancing the books?
While the defence may have benefited from a testimony that many felt had strayed too far, some believe the lengthy cross-examination may have balanced the books.
During a fierce, terse cross-examination spanning several hours, Ms Necheles and Ms Daniels repeatedly butted heads.
Ms Necheles attempted to portray Ms Daniels as a greedy extortionist who made up about her alleged affair with Mr Trump to “threaten” him.
In a bid to use her career as a porn star and director against her, Ms Necheles pointed to the hundreds of “phoney” films about sex Ms Daniels had starred in or written
“And now you have a story you have been telling about having sex with president Trump, right?” Ms Necheles asked.
“And if that story was untrue, I would have written it to be a lot better”, an abrasive Ms Daniels shot back, prompting laughter in the courtroom, and at least one smile among the jury.
Mitchell Epner, a partner at law firm Kudman Trachten Aloe Posner, believes Ms Necheles’ tunnelvision on disproving the alleged sex act ever happened was a “tremendous gift” for the prosecution.
The former federal prosecutor said a smarter move would have been for the defence to briefly cross-examine Ms Daniels to show her testimony is irrelevant to the case.
‘Trump is incensed’
He thinks, however, Ms Necheles had no choice but to aggressively fight the allegations of whether Ms Daniels and Mr Trump had sex that night because it’s what her client wanted.
“I know Ms Necheles professionally, she is an incredibly skilled criminal litigator. I do not think that that is the cross-examination that she would have used if she had a different client,” he said.
“I think that Trump is incensed about this testimony and wants her beat up, and his desire to have her [Daniels] beat up became a more important metric than an actually effective cross-examination.”
While not even Ms Daniels and her supernatural instincts can know what the jury will decide when it comes to sending the first former US president to prison, they will not be short of material to discuss when it comes to deliberations.
The second star witness in the case, Mr Trump’s former “fixer” Michael Cohen, is expected to take the stand next week.
When he comes face-to-face with his friend-turned-nemesis Mr Trump, the convicted lawyer will spare no details when he accuses the Republican front-runner of covering up a $130,000 hush money payment to silence Ms Daniels.
Mr Trump may well be writhing in his chair yet again.
