How Stormy Daniels Went From Porn Star to Trump’s Bed to #Resistance Hero

Perhaps no name invokes the insanity of the Trump presidency more than Stormy Daniels. The 43-year-old entertainer, who went from celebrated porn star to unexpected darling of the girl-boss left, tangled with the worst of that era’s milieu, from hangdog Trump fixer Michael Cohen to sleazy lawyer Michael Avenatti to the president himself. Now, she may help send her 90-second stand to jail.

A grand jury voted to indict Trump on Thursday after the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation of his role in a $130,000 payment during his 2016 campaign to prevent Daniel from speaking out about their alleged affair. Daniels is said to have spoken with prosecutors in the case, while Cohen testified before the grand jury. (Avenatti, Daniels’ former attorney, could not testify, because he is in prison.)

But how did Daniels go from porn star to #resistance icon? A recap, for those of us who may have erased some of this from our memory.

Daniels was born Stephanie Clifford in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to a mother who “liked to throw things” and a father who fled to Alaska when she was 4. In her memoir, Full Disclosure, she writes that she was raped repeatedly by a neighbor at age 9; two of her childhood crushes die in the first 25 pages. Despite her good grades and strong extracurriculars, Daniels knew her upbringing didn’t set her up for success. So when a friend invited her to do a guest dance at a local strip club, she put her childhood dance lessons to use and dazzled the crowd. She was hired that night.

From there, Daniels hit the road as a traveling ecdysiast, performing up to 15 shows a week. She wound up riding along on a whirlwind tour with the metal band Pantera and eventually moved to Los Angeles, where a coworker convinced her they could make more money doing porn. She racked up Adult Video News awards including “best new starlet,” her energy and phenomenally huge tits scoring her top marks. (The boobs were an accident, she claims: The doctor she hired for a breast augmentation when she was 19 told her he “filled them up til l liked them.”)

Daniels eventually determined she liked directing better than starring in porn and became one of the better-known female directors in the business. That’s what she was doing when she met Donald Trump, and set off one of the most epic cheating scandals in American political history.

Trump and Daniels met in 2006, at what GQ once called a “libidinous weekend” at the American Century Celebrity Golf Championship. Trump spotted her on the golf course and, according to Daniels, told her he wanted to “come talk to [her] later.” That set off what Daniels claims was a months-long relationship in which Trump frequently dangled a guest spot on The Apprentice. (The guest spot never materialized; Trump has denied any such affair.)

When Daniels tried to go public about tryst to InTouch magazine in 2011, she claims, a Trump crony cornered her in a parking lot and warned her to stay mum.

“That’s a beautiful little girl,” she told 60 Minutes of her daughter, who was then less than a year old. “It’d be a shame if something happened to her mom.”

So Daniels stayed quiet until 2015, when Trump decided to run for president. Numerous outlets approached her about the story, she says, but the most appealing offer came from someone on the inside: Michael Cohen, Trump’s attorney and personal fixer.

Cohen offered Daniels $130,000 to stay quiet about the affair—a payment that was later ruled an illegal campaign contribution and landed Cohen in jail. Daniels agreed, but in January 2018, The Wall Street Journal published an article revealing that payment and one other, to Playboy model Karen McDougal, through the National Enquirer’s parent company, American Media, which bought the rights to their stories and then buried them.

While Trump waffled on the allegations—first saying he had no idea about the payment, then saying he paid Cohen back—Daniels rode them straight to stardom: interviews with Anderson Cooper and Jimmy Kimmel; a guest spot on Saturday Night Live. She commented on everything from the quality of the sex (”the worst 90 seconds of my life,”) to the shape of his penis (“like a toadstool.”)

The revelations—and Daniels’ sassy Twitter quips—delighted liberals, fueling headlines and late-night routines for months to come. Daniels’ following boomed, and she promptly launched a Trump-skewering stripping tour called “Make America Horny Again.” (“He saw her live. You can too,” one of the tour posters boasted.) West Hollywood gave her the keys to the city.

The former Penthouse model even posed for famed photographer Annie Leibovitz in the pages of Vogue, where she revealed she had been in several car chases and had notes slipped under her door since the story broke. “Do you want to be Thelma or Louise, Michael?” she joked to her lawyer at the time.

But Daniels pushed back on the idea that she was using the scandal for personal gain, telling a Time interviewer: “I’m doing the same thing I’ve always done. But if you drive an ice cream truck and the city has a heat wave, you’d be an idiot not to drive your ice cream truck.”

At the same time, Daniels battled Trump in court with the help of Avenatti, whose sharp one-liners and sharper jawline made him equally adored by the left. Together they sued to break her nondisclosure agreement, which a judge deemed unenforceable, and filed a defamation suit over one of the president’s tweets about the case. “Stormy Daniels’s Lawyer Is Out-Trumping Trump,” an Atlantic headline blared.

Ultimately, the relationship between Daniels and Avenatti went south: The attorney was sentenced last year to four years in prison for stealing proceeds from Daniels’ book advance, and another 14 for stealing millions from others. (Daniels also claims he filed the defamation suit, which she lost in October 2018, without her knowledge.) But the damage to Trump lived on.

Prosecutors allege the Daniels payoff constituted an illegal campaign donation—one that implicates Trump as well as Cohen, since the former admitted to reimbursing the latter for the payment. Cohen, meanwhile, thoroughly flipped on his former boss, claiming Trump directed him to make the payments in order to protect his campaign from scandal. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg convened a grand jury earlier this year to weigh possible criminal charges, to which Trump responded by calling the Black prosecutor a “racist” and a “Soros-backed radical left prosecutor.”

Daniels, meanwhile, lives in New Orleans with her husband and fellow porn professional Barret Blade, whom she married in 2022. (Daniels and her third husband, Glendon Crain, divorced shortly after the affair allegations broke in 2018.) They recently co-created an as-yet unreleased erotic film, Lawless.

The star also hosts a gay dating show on OUTtv called For The Love of DILFs, and continues to rack up mentions for her porn direction—most recently, an AVN best screenplay nomination for Hysteria, a full-length erotic thriller about a failing marriage. She’s also developing something called the Spooky Babes Show, on which she investigates paranormal activities with a crew of Mississippi ghost hunters.

According to her Instagram, she also continues to ride horses, a hobby she picked up as a pre-teen in Baton Rouge.

“I may never have a normal life again. Some days I break down and say, ‘I wish this had never happened, it’s absolutely not worth it,’” she told The Washington Post of going public with her story in 2018.

“But I’ve slowly realized and sort of made peace with it and I’m going to say a good 85-90 percent of the time now, I think it was totally worth it.”