Trump’s criminal trial: Key witness Stormy Daniels takes the stand

Key witness adult film actress Stormy Daniels took to the witness stand Tuesday morning in former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial.

Alleged “hush money” payments made to Daniels by Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, prior to the 2016 election, are at the heart of the 34-felony count case Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is accusing Trump of.

Daniels agreed to stay silent about her encounter in exchange for $130,000.

The presumptive presidential candidate has been accused of falsifying business records used to pay off Daniels from speaking out about an alleged sexual encounter between the two during a celebrity golf tournament at Lake Tahoe in 2006 that Trump was participating in and where Daniels was promoting the adult film studio she worked for.

In her testimony, Daniels’ said she “blacked out” during the sexual encounter but emphasized that she was not drunk or drugged.

In a video Trump published on Truth Social to the public outside the courtroom, he explained that the payments made to Cohen were labeled as “legal expenses.”

He referred to a statement by Good Morning America: “We heard that expense payments to lawyers are legal expenses. ... The legal expense that we paid was put down as ‘legal expense.’ There’s nothing else you could say.”

Trump has denied any wrongdoing in the charges by Bragg, as well as having any intimate encounters with Daniels.

Daniels’ and Trump’s history

During Daniels’ morning testimony, Judge Juan Merchan criticized her descriptive accounts of her encounters with Trump and told her to “just answer the questions” after sustaining multiple defense objections and clearing her comments from the court record, per The New York Times.

The defense even requested a mistrial due to Daniels’ explicit testimony, but Merchan denied the request.

In her testimony, Daniels shared that her and Trump’s relationship was never intimate again following the gold tournament but that she had multiple public encounters with him before the 2016 presidential election.

However, “Jurors heard last week from Trump’s former executive assistant, Rhona Graff, that Stormy Daniels showed up at Trump Tower in 2007, the year after the golf course event, which he said was the only time he saw her,” The New York Times added.

In the 2007 meeting, she said Trump brought up having her as a guest on his show, “Celebrity Apprentice.” However, a few weeks later, he called to say he could not make that happen.

When asked if she thought Trump was concerned about keeping their relationship confidential, she replied, “Absolutely not,” per CBS News.

A couple of years later, in 2011, she said the gossip magazine In Touch contacted her for an interview regarding her relationship with Trump. Her agent set it up, and Daniels was expected to be paid $15,000.

“Daniels said she agreed to the interview because she wanted to ‘control the narrative’ and would ‘rather make money than someone make money off of me,’” CBS News added. But the story never ended up running. “Daniels said she was approached by a man in a parking lot while she was with her daughter. ‘He threatened me to not continue telling my story’ about Trump, Daniels testified. She said she didn’t go to the police because she was scared.”

Daniels added that in October 2016, she learned that Trump and Cohen were prepared to offer her money to sign a nondisclosure agreement. She considered accepting the agreement as the optimal choice to keep her then-husband from finding out. But, she also mentioned that receiving payment was not a concern for her.

“It’s money but the number didn’t matter to me, and I didn’t pick the number,” she said, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Daniels’ cross-examination

Trump’s Attorney, Susan Necheles, pushed the narrative that Stormy Daniels was using her story with Trump to make a profit during her cross-examination of the key witness Tuesday afternoon.

Necheles speculated about Daniels’ reasoning behind her willingness to tell her story in 2016 rather than years earlier.

“You were looking to extort money from President Trump,” Necheles said, per The Associated Press.

“False,” Daniels responded.

“Well, that’s what you did,” Necheles said.

“False,” Daniels said again. “I was a very different and much braver person in 2016 than I was in 2011. And Donald Trump was not just a guy on television, he was running for president.”

In another similar exchange, Necheles further questioned why Daniels would share her story even though she was supposedly in fear after being threatened by a stranger to keep silent in 2011.

“I was terrified,” Daniels said, per CNN. “‘I just had to change my tactic because it was a new ballgame’ now that Trump was a presidential candidate,” she added.

“The truth is you saw that opportunity to make money,” Necheles said.

Daniels responded, “I saw the opportunity to get the story out. I didn’t put a price tag on it.”

According to CNN, the defense showed jurors text messages between Gina Rodriguez, Daniels’ manager at the time, and National Enquirer editor Dylan Howard in June of 2016:

“I thought she denounced it previously,” Howard texted. To which Rodriguez responded, “She said she will do it under 2 conditions. She doesn’t want to go on record about it but will tell the story through a source. She’s had sex with him. She wants 100k.”

Necheles then asked if these messages proved she was trying to sell her story. “I was pushing, I wanted to tell my story, yes,” Daniels said.

The jury was dismissed following her nearly four-hour testimony. Daniels will continue to be cross-examined when court continues on Thursday.