Less than two minutes after Stormy Daniels emerged from the bathroom of a Nevada hotel room, Donald Trump was standing before her “in his underwear, doing the world’s worst Burt Reynolds impressions,” she remembered in a new Vogue interview. She doesn’t remember how or why he stripped down.
She also doesn’t understand ever taking off her shoes, or “how I got from the doorway to being underneath him in the bed,” Daniels said. She remembers putting them back on and leaving the hotel room, though, going over what had just happened. “I know I didn’t say no,” she explained in the profile, published Tuesday. “But I also know I didn’t say yes. I wasn’t threatened… I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
Daniels, 44, has repeated her account of her three-minute fling with Trump many times since first going public with it in a 60 Minutes interview in 2018, 13 years after she met him at a celebrity golf tournament and agreed to meet him for dinner that night, ostensibly to discuss her appearing on The Celebrity Apprentice.
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She’s related the details of the subsequent encounter before: That she went up to his hotel room and, surprised to see Trump answer the door in his pajamas, smacked him on the ass with a magazine and told him to get dressed.
But Daniels told Vogue that she hadn’t been flirting with the mogul. “People made that out like I was flirting,” she said. “I wasn’t. It was like, What are you doing? Put your clothes on.”
From there, Daniels followed him inside his sprawling hotel room—more like “a giant apartment,” she said—and he put on a suit, asking her questions about her job. “He was smart!” she said. “Not, like, Einstein, but—like, he spoke in whole sentences.”
Daniels has previously said the sex was consensual. But she relayed it to Vogue as something more dubious, saying that she remembered thinking that his bodyguard was just outside the door. If she hit Trump, she said she thought, would the bodyguard come into the room? “I remember him saying, ‘Do you want to go back to the trailer park?’” she said, adding, “I never said I lived in a trailer park; I didn’t. I said we were poor.…”
Years later, as Trump was gearing up for his first shot at the White House, he allegedly had his then-fixer Michael Cohen pay Daniels $130,000 for her silence. Daniels said she doesn’t know exactly how or why that hush payment was arranged. “All I really know is, I got a check,” she told Vogue. “And then all hell broke loose.”
The revelation of the affair and the payment kicked off a chain-reaction of events that led to Trump’s indictment last week. On Tuesday, he pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts from inside a Manhattan courthouse. He faces a potential criminal trial in January. Daniels, for her part, is hoping that it’s just the first of several to come.
“For my own sake, I’d like vindication, I’d like him to get what’s coming for once,” she said. “But that’s about me, and there’s other stuff that’s more, like, about the country.…”
Around the time of Trump’s arraignment, he won a small victory against Daniels, with a California federal appeals court ordering her to foot the bill for Trump’s attorney fees in the wake of her failed libel suit against him. The $122,000 she was ordered to pay on Tuesday is in addition to the $293,000 she was initially ordered to pay after her defamation claim, filed in 2018, was thrown out by a court that same year.
“I will go to jail before I pay a penny,” Daniels tweeted last March after losing an appeal of the decision. She has repeatedly said the suit was filed against her wishes.
She did not comment publicly on the appeals court’s Tuesday order. Instead, Daniels confined herself to taunting Trump with one of her preferred nicknames for him, “Tiny” (for his penis size, but also for “his IQ, integrity, hands, etc.,” she wrote earlier this week), and defending herself from his fans.
“Y’all keep saying ‘cum dumpster’ like it’s a bad thing,” she tweeted. “It’s definitely more fun being under my sexy man instead of being under arrest.”
