A last-ditch effort by Donald Trump to halt jurors from hearing the more salacious details of his sexual affair with porn star Stormy Daniels blew up in his face on Tuesday, as the judge used the former president’s very same reasoning to arrive at the completely opposite conclusion.
With Daniels set to testify later Tuesday, Trump had his lawyers start the morning by asking Justice Juan Merchan to block prosecutors from questioning the porn star too closely about their one-night stand on July 13, 2006, during a charity event at the Edgewood Tahoe Golf Course on the Nevada state line with California.
Susan Necheles, a Trump defense lawyer, argued that the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office shouldn’t be allowed to ask what happened exactly at the hotel that night.
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In reality, the details aren’t as damning as they are embarrassing. As Daniels laid out in her 2018 book, Full Disclosure, Trump invited her to his penthouse suite under the guise of taking her out to dinner—only to surprise her in the room wearing his black silk pajamas and slippers. When she came back from a bathroom break, she found Trump lying at the edge of the bed in his underwear.
“I lay there, annoyed that I was getting fucked by a guy with Yeti pubes and a dick like the mushroom character in Mario Kart,” she recalled in the book. “He has an unusual penis. It has a huge mushroom head. Like a toadstool.”
In her book, she called the two-minute session “the definition of bad sex.”
In court, DA investigation division chief Susan Hoffinger pushed back on Trump’s attempt to skip over the particulars.
“The details of the encounter, your Honor, are important,” she said, noting that it would be important for jurors to know “how she ended up having a sexual act with him.”
However, Hoffinger noted, “it's not going to involve any descriptions of genitalia or anything of that nature."
Necheles scrambled to shut that down.
“There’s just no need for any of those kinds of details here,” she said. “I don’t think it’s needed in this case. This case is about books and records. We shouldn’t get into how she felt about it.”
But when Necheles tried to stress that the porn star’s credibility should be questioned, the judge took the opportunity to turn the ship around.
“I agree with you that she’s got some credibility issues... so it’s more important for the people to establish some information,” Merchan said.
The judge said he was satisfied with the plan by prosecutors to let jurors hear about what happened—but not get into the nitty gritty.
“There will be some details, very briefly, about the sexual act,” Hoffinger conceded.
“That’s fine,” Merchan said with a laugh. “But we don’t need to know the details, of course.”
