NEW YORK — Donald Trump sat stone-faced as Stormy Daniels, the adult-film actress at the center of his criminal hush money trial, described meeting him at a 2006 golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, Calif.
“Do you see Mr. Trump in the courtroom today?” a prosecutor asked Daniels.
“Yes,” she replied.
“Could you point him out?” the prosecutor asked.
Daniels shifted as she looked around the room. “Navy blue jacket, second on the table,” she replied.
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Daniels raised her eyes to look at the man she says paid her $130,000 to stay silent about a 2006 extramarital tryst in a Lake Tahoe hotel room — and who prosecutors say falsified business records to cover up that payment as he ran for president of the United States.
The courtroom confrontation Tuesday was Daniels’s and Trump’s first face-to-face meeting in years. It was also a remarkable moment in U.S. history: A former and potential future president, in the midst of a campaign for the White House, was forced to listen as a woman who claims he had sex with her detailed the most intimate details of their alleged encounter — and suggested that the sex was unwanted.
From the moment she entered the courtroom — after a prosecutor announced “the people call Stormy Daniels” — Daniels offered a vivid account of her relationship with Trump, describing a difficult power dynamic with a then-television star that left her feeling ashamed.
The former president, on trial for multiple felonies, appeared quiet as Daniels recalled the graphic details of what she characterized as an unwanted sexual encounter. At times, she seemed to suggest that the sex was nonconsensual. Trump was “bigger and blocking the way,” she said, before adding that she was “not threatened.”
Daniels told the court that she found herself staring at the ceiling. “I didn’t know how I got there,” she said, but added that she was neither drunk nor under the influence of drugs.
Trump denies ever having sex with Daniels and denies all the charges against him.
At one point Tuesday, when the court took its morning recess, New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan warned Trump’s lawyer that the former president was “cursing audibly” and “shaking his head visually and that’s contemptuous,” according to an early transcript released shortly after Tuesday’s testimony. Merchan warned: “It has the potential to intimidate the witness and the jury can see that.” Trump’s lawyer said he would speak to him.
More than a dozen women have accused Trump of sexual assault or misconduct. He denies all of the allegations. Last year, a civil jury in New York found that Trump sexually abused and defamed E. Jean Carroll, a writer who said he assaulted her in the mid-1990s.
Daniels appeared nervous at times during her testimony Tuesday, talking fast enough that a prosecutor asked her several times to slow down as she spoke. She squirmed in her seat, clasped her hands, adjusted her glasses and at times looked around the room. Daniels at times offered long-winded answers, making side commentary about her interactions with Trump.
“What could possibly go wrong?” she asked rhetorically while on the stand.
At one point, Merchan interjected: “Just please keep the answer short.” Merchan also scolded prosecutors, telling them: “The degree of detail you are going into here is just unnecessary.” Shortly after the court broke for lunch, Merchan described Daniels as “a little difficult to control,” even as he denied the defense team’s request for a mistrial.
Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, told the jury that she did not want to have sex with Trump and said that afterward, her hands “were shaking so hard I was having a hard time getting dressed.” She said that Trump did not use a condom when they had sex but that she didn’t say anything. Asked whether the lack of protection was concerning, Daniels replied: “Yes.” Yet she said they stayed in touch because, she said, she was hoping that Trump would let her appear on his hit reality show, “The Apprentice.”
Trump’s and Daniels’s paths diverged after 2007, when Daniels says the pair briefly reunited for a chaste viewing of the Discovery Channel’s annual “Shark Week” marathon. Daniels described her life after interacting with Trump as “pretty awesome.” She directed music videos, got married, had a daughter and moved to Texas.
Trump won the White House, then lost it and claimed he didn’t, fueling an attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Now Trump faces 88 felony charges in four separate cases. But this case — the first to go to trial — is likely to be the only one that will require him to listen to an adult-film actress describe, in graphic detail, spanking him with a rolled-up magazine.
Trump clearly did not relish being in the courtroom Tuesday. He whispered to one of his attorneys, Todd Blanche, during several of Daniels’s answers. As Daniels described a magazine interview she gave about their affair, Trump looked at his watch.
Trump’s New York trial — and the requirement that he attend in person — has placed him in an environment where he has little control. At his campaign rallies and his Mar-a-Lago parties, he’s in charge. In the courtroom, Judge Merchan is.
During the lunch break, Trump posted on social media that the prosecution “has gone too far. Mistrial!”
But he appeared more relaxed in the afternoon, sitting back in his chair and watching closely as his lawyer Susan Necheles had a testy exchange with Daniels during the defense’s cross-examination.
“Am I correct that you hate President Trump?” Necheles asked Daniels.
“Yes,” Daniels replied. She added that she “absolutely” wants to see Trump go to jail if he is found guilty.
Necheles also asked Daniels about the insults she has hurled at Trump on social media. She once tweeted: “I don’t owe him s--- and I’ll never give that orange turd a dime.” He has called her “horseface.”
As Trump exited the courthouse, he refrained from talking about Daniels directly. Instead, he called Tuesday “a very big day, a very revealing day,” and lamented that the trial was taking him away from the campaign trail.
One person close to Trump, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation, told The Post last month that just being in the courtroom is difficult for the former president.
“The phrase around here,” the person said, “is ‘the process is the punishment.’”
Unfortunately for Trump, this part of the process is not over. Daniels will testify again when Trump’s trial resumes Thursday.
Devlin Barrett, Shayna Jacobs, Tom Jackman and Josh Dawsey contributed to this report.
