On Wednesday, InTouch magazine ran excerpts from an interview with adult-film star Stormy Daniels (née Stephanie Clifford) wherein she detailed having a 2006 affair with then-future-president Donald Trump.
The piece was the first confirmation from Daniels about the affair, which had been much rumored prior to the 2016 election and drew renewed attention this past week after The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s personal lawyer paid her $130,000 to keep quiet.
But Wednesday’s story is just the beginning of the saga, not the conclusion of it. According to a source familiar with the matter, later this week, InTouch is planning to run the entire unedited interview it conducted with Daniels. All 5,500 words of it.
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The interview with Daniels was conducted in 2011, which means it occurred before the performer signed the reported NDA. The magazine also verified Daniels’ account with two sources at the time and had the actress take a polygraph.
According to Daniels, she and Trump first met at a golf tournament in Lake Tahoe in July 2006, just four months after his youngest son Barron was born. Trump asked for Daniels’ number and invited her to dinner. When she arrived, he was wearing sweatpants, and they ended up eating in his hotel room. She excused herself to the bathroom and when she emerged, Daniels told InTouch Trump was sitting on the bed and invited her to join him.
“Ugh, here we go,” thought Daniels. She described the sex as “textbook generic.”
In the print version of the magazine, Daniels expanded further, describing the sex as "nothing crazy. It was one position, what you would expect someone his age to do." She also said that they did not use protection, which, the magazine reported, "is unlike her."
Daniels revealed that Trump asked her to sign a DVD copy of her film 3 Wishes and that he called her roughly every 10 days after their first encounter. As for the later encounters, she said: “We had really good banter. He told me once that I was someone to be reckoned with, beautiful, smart, just like his daughter.” Trump even had a nickname for her, she said: "honeybunch."
A source tells The Daily Beast that the full, unedited interview that will run later this week is 5,500 words of “cray.” Daniels didn’t leave much out in describing the affair, which involved a few more encounters in the months following their first tryst in Tahoe.
According to the source, the transcript contains details of “[w]hat he’s like in bed, pillow talk, she talks about what he’s like down there…”
The source declined to go into more details but added that Daniels was not paid for the interview. Suffice to say, the American public is going to learn much more about the president’s body than they could possibly have learned from the physical he performed last week.
The White House, Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen, and Daniels have all denied that she was paid off for her silence or that the sex ever happened. In a January 10 statement released by Cohen on her behalf, Daniels said that any allegations that she and Trump had a sexual relationship were “completely false.”
Reached for comment, Cohen insisted that the new revelations were, actually, not new at all. “This is not Breaking News,” he told The Daily Beast. “It’s old news that wasn't true then and not true now. This identical piece was published on October 24, 2011 in Life & Style magazine. Life & Style is owned by Bauer Publishing Company that also owns In Touch Weekly. All they did is recirculate an old and debunked story that Ms. Clifford denied in 2011, 2016 and again in 2018. Shocking that the media missed this!”
Rumors of Trump’s affair with Daniels did, indeed, grace the cover of the October 24, 2011 issue of Life & Style. But the article itself—a copy of which was provided by Cohen to The Daily Beast—was hardly identical. There were no direct quotes from Daniels in it. Nor was there a denial from her about a relationship with the future president. Instead, it noted that both she and Trump had declined to comment.
The InTouch interview appears to contradict those statements.
The Daniels affair story has made the rounds a few times. On Tuesday, CNN’s Oliver Darcy reported that Fox News had a story on the affair ready to go in October, but it was spiked. The Daily Beast was also chasing the story last fall, but, like several other outlets, was unable to lock it down.
Updated on Jan. 17, 2018, 5:58 p.m. to add comment from Michael Cohen.
