After a Rough Week of Testimony, Stormy Daniels Seems to Have the Upper Hand

Read our ongoing coverage of Donald Trump’s first criminal trial here.

We’re more than halfway through Donald Trump’s hush money trial, with the only remaining major witness to take the stand for the prosecution, Michael Cohen, expected to testify next week. Barring the former president opting to testify in his own defense, though, the main event of the trial likely has come and gone with this week’s explosive and unnerving Stormy Daniels testimony.

As they previewed in earlier cross-examinations, the defense’s entire case has rested on attacking Daniels’ credibility, essentially claiming that she extorted candidate Trump in 2016 with a false claim about a sexual encounter to make money. To do this, they used every misogynistic trope in the he-said-she-said book: They called Daniels money-hungry. They said she was promiscuous. They called her a liar and a cheat. They called her a kook and a mystic. They tried everything they could. Ultimately, though, while Trump’s lawyer, Susan Necheles, was able to score a point or two off of Daniels, the adult film actor was able to maintain her composure and leave the room with both her dignity and credibility largely intact. In short, Daniels weathered the storm.

It wasn’t necessarily certain this was going to be the case after Tuesday’s rocky direct examination, in which Daniels gave long, discursive answers and was repeatedly interrupted by the judge and prosecutor asking her to slow down and say less. At the end of Tuesday’s session, prior to cross-examination, Justice Juan Merchan asked the prosecution to bring their witness more into line, and prosecutor Susan Hoffinger assured him that Daniels would “stay focused” and “not provide any unnecessary narrative.”

With her character under withering assault by Necheles on Thursday, Daniels followed Hoffinger’s instructions to the letter. She gave brief, composed, thoughtful answers and seemed to have a response for nearly everything. Again, much to the apparent delight of the defendant, those attacks were relentless.

Even though it’s Trump who is accused of cheating on his wife Melania in 2006 while she was recovering from the birth of their son, Barron, Necheles tried to depict Daniels as the cheater. Trump’s lawyer asked Daniels if she “cheated” on her husband with her documentarian. “We started dating and he stopped filming as soon as we started dating,” Daniels quickly responded. “I was separated from my husband.”

Necheles all but called Daniels a whore, pointing to tweets describing her as an “aging harlot,” another calling her a “disgusting degenerate prostitute,” and one calling her “a human toilet.” Pointing to previous testimony where Daniels said she “blacked out” when she came out of the bathroom in Trump’s suite to see him on the bed in his boxers, Trump’s lawyer suggested that whatever sexual encounter she might have had with Trump could not possibly have been shocking or upsetting to her, given how many men and women she’s had sex with as part of her adult film career.

“You’ve acted and had sex in 200 porn movies?” Necheles asked. “Including comps,” Daniels said, unashamed, clarifying that she meant “compilations.” Necheles then challenged: Would she be shocked if she had seen a man in his boxers on a porn shoot? “Absolutely,” Daniels responded, “if I came out of a bathroom and I saw an older man in his underwear that I wasn’t expecting to see there.”

Necheles then tried to portray Daniels as a fantasist. “You have a lot of experience making phony stories about sex appear to be real?” Necheles said, pointing to Daniels’ prolific work as a writer and director on adult films. “The sex in the [films], it’s very much real, just like what happened to me in that room,” Daniels replied in devastating fashion. But didn’t Daniels pride herself, Necheles wondered aloud, on writing “really good stories and really good dialogue?”—implying everything she has said about the alleged encounter with Trump was fabricated. “If that story was untrue, I would have written it to be a lot better,” Daniels quipped. “I’m a good screenwriter,” she said, but “I didn’t have to write this one.”

Necheles further denigrated Daniels for her profession, claiming she “made money working in sex clubs” that advertised her connection to Trump. “I don’t work in sex clubs, I work in strip clubs,” Daniels responded. “There’s a big difference.”

Daniels was funny throughout even as Necheles was essentially calling her every name in the book. When Trump’s attorney spent a seeming eternity querying Daniels on whether she and Trump actually had dinner that night—as she appeared to claim in an edited transcript of an interview she gave In Touch magazine in 2011—or never ate, Daniels was fast, quippy, and relatable. “I went to dinner and didn’t get dinner,” she said. “It was dinnertime, I was invited to dinner, but I never saw any food.” If she had eaten, she said, “I would have talked about the food” in interviews because “I’m very food motivated.”

Necheles further quibbled that Daniels said in her In Touch interview that Trump was “nice, intelligent in conversation,” which the lawyer argued contradicted Daniels’ testimony about her encounter with Trump. “It was a nice, intelligent conversation,” Daniels retorted. “The conversation was intelligent and interesting. I enjoyed it.” Daniels had never suggested otherwise in previous testimony, in fact, and it further bolstered her credibility to compliment a man she clearly despises on his conversational skills.

Indeed, Necheles suggested Daniels was a Trump hater doing all of this to target the former president’s political hopes and that she had bragged that she would be “instrumental in putting President Trump in jail.” This is where things got even darker and sadder.

To make the case, Necheles pointed to a tweet from an unnamed user calling Daniels a “human toilet,” to which Daniels responded with a tweet of her own saying that that would make her the best person to “flush the orange turd down.”

“I don’t see ‘instrumental’ or ‘jail’ anywhere in that—you’re putting words in my mouth,” Daniels said.

“You don’t want to say who you meant by ‘orange turd’?” Necheles challenged. “Oh, I absolutely meant Mr. Trump,” Daniels responded.

The juvenile back-and-forth was a continuation from Tuesday’s testimony, but it wasn’t necessarily bad for the prosecution. Necheles pointed to another “orange turd” tweet of Daniels’ and asked, “That’s you calling President Trump names, right?” Daniels replied that it was “in retaliation for what he said about me, yes.” Jurors had previously seen a post Trump sent out calling Daniels “horseface.” “You despised him and you made fun of how he looks?” Nechles asked. “Because he made fun of me first,” she responded. Both Daniels and Trump, who is the actual defendant, come out of these exchanges sounding like schoolchildren ridiculing each other. This cannot help Trump’s case.

Again, Daniels may have even come out ahead in this testimony, because it corroborates a point prosecutors and Daniels have been trying to make about this entire episode: Instead of “benefiting” financially off of her alleged sexual encounter with Trump, as defense attorneys argue, the fallout from that encounter has been a disaster for her personally and financially.

Daniels walked through some of that fallout. “I have had to hire security, take extra precautions,” she testified. “I had to move my daughter to a safe place to live.”

“On balance, has your publicly telling the truth about your experiences with Mr. Trump been net positive or net negative in your life?” asked prosecutor Hoffinger.

“Negative,” she testified. After this week’s events, it seems like it will be hard for a jury to determine anything otherwise.