Read our ongoing coverage of Donald Trump’s first criminal trial here.
On Tuesday, the main event of Donald Trump’s criminal trial swept through the courtroom as the woman at the center of the hush money scandal, Stormy Daniels herself, showed up to testify against the former president. Trump previewed that it would be a big day when he posted on Truth Social—and then deleted—his https://twitter.com/kaitlancollins/status/1787815447917736443 was being allowed to testify. But the emotional intensity of having the woman at the center of this scandal describe her sexual encounter with Donald Trump that led to his arrest 17 years later—in front of the former president and his son, Eric, who was also present—is hard to describe.
There was a heaviness in the air, even if the former president’s main reaction to Daniels’ testimony was—as he’s done throughout the proceedings—to simply close his eyes. (Longtime Trump reporter Maggie Haberman wrote for the New York Times that an adviser told her Trump does this to “keep from blowing up,” adding that on Tuesday, he was “looking like his face is going to crack from tension.” )
After some brief objections at the start of the day over the level of detail offered by Daniels, the judge ruled that she would be allowed to describe some details of what happened, but guided the prosecution to keep it underdeveloped so as not to be “overly “prejudicial” to the defense. Daniels, who was wearing a black hooded sweater over a dark (I think green) dress and dark glasses, is famously open about her long career in the porn industry, as both a director and an actor. “How she ended up having a sexual act with him and in terms of the sexual act, it will be very basic,” prosecutor Susan Hoffinger promised. “It’s not going to include discussions of genitalia or anything of that nature.”
“There will be some details, very brief about the sexual act, very brief,” Hoffinger added.
Justice Juan Merchan laughed awkwardly at this, saying that we “don’t need” all the details, but he has offered the prosecution some leeway to help them to establish Daniels’ credibility (which is sure to come under blistering assault on cross-examination this afternoon). Both Daniels and Hoffinger took full advantage of this leeway—and Trump’s team at times seemed slow to object, to the point that the jury ended up hearing a lot more details of the encounter than most in the courtroom were expecting.
“It’s fucking insane what the jury heard this morning,” said one journalist upon returning after lunch.
What they heard was a full account of Trump’s encounter with Daniels that laid out in precise detail every aspect of the meeting (including that the sex itself was “brief”). What was perhaps the most jarring, particularly on the heels of last week’s testimony from Hope Hicks about the infamous Access Hollywood tape, is that telling this described the interaction as sexual coercion bordering on assault.
What Daniels shared was this: After a two-hour conversation in a hotel suite following a meeting at a celebrity golf tournament in Tahoe, Daniels testified that she went into the bathroom to use the facilities (where she pried through her toiletry bag, which included Old Spice, Pert Plus, and gold tweezers). When she left the room, Daniels says Trump had removed most of his clothes and was sitting on the bed in his boxers and a T-shirt. He then got between her and the door. “The next thing I knew I was on the opposite side of the bed… I had my clothes and my shoes off,” Daniels testified. “We were [in] missionary position.”
Objection! Sustained.
“Do you know how your clothes came off?”
Objection! Sustained
“Did you end up having sex with him on the bed?”
“Forks.”
“Do you have a memory of feeling anything unusual?”
“That I was staring up at the ceiling and didn’t know how I got there.”
“Did you touch his skin?”
Objection! Sustained!
“Was he wearing a condom?”
“No.”
From this point on, Merchan kept a much tighter leash on the direct examination, which had strayed way beyond what the judge said he had intended.
Stormy Daniels did tell her story, though, on the record, under oath. According to Daniels, after the encounter she met up with Trump again while in Tahoe and was introduced to NFL quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, who, like Trump, has been repeatedly accused of sexual assault. “He introduced me as his little friend Stormy to Big Ben the football player and we sat down,” Daniels said. She said she tried on Roethlisberger’s Super Bowl ring, and Trump asked him to walk her home to her hotel room. This is relevant because Hope Hicks had testified on Friday to overhearing conversations about interactions between Roethlisberger and Daniels from Trump and his bodyguard, Keith Schiller, during the campaign itself, which would seem to corroborate part of Daniels’ story about her.
Daniels, for her part, came off as relatably as possible for an adult film performer describing a sexual encounter with a former president. She talked about how she was in the top 10 percent of her magnet-school class and had been on the high school newspaper. She gave what sounded like a made-for-TV account of a young woman from a poor and abusive household just stumbling into this line of work. She tried to make jokes about the porn industry and laughed awkwardly herself as nobody in the courtroom joined her. At one point, the Baton Rouge native apologized awkwardly for her accent. She seemed incredibly nervous and spoke fast—so fast, in fact, that both the judge and Hoffinger had to ask her to slow down several times in order for the court reporter to be able to take in everything she was saying. The speed of her description is one reason why she testified to multiple things that the judge had to strike from the record, including that right before they actually had sex, she says Trump told her, “If you ever want to get out of that trailer park,” before she was cut off with an objection. The jury was told to disregard those remarks. Daniels also repeatedly testified how she planned her subsequent meetings with Trump to be in public because she knew that she would be “safe,” which she again was consistently objected to and struck from the record.
This was the weight in that courtroom. The story Stormy Daniels told was one of sexual coercion. That reality makes clear that it was a story that—had it come out in the days after the release of the Access Hollywood tape prior to the 2016 election—might have made a difference in a race that was decided by some 120,000-plus votes in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
So damning—and, contrary to the judge’s instructions, detailed—was the account Stormy gave that upon returning from lunch, Trump defense attorney Todd Blanche asked the court for a mistrial.
“The court set guardrails for this testimony and the guardrails… were just thrown to the side,” Blanche testified. “There’s no way to unring the bell, in our sight.”
Hoffinger argued that the prosecution opened the door for much of the testimony by attacking Daniels’ character in cross-examinations of previous witnesses. She also noted that Daniels testified that she never felt verbally physically threatened by Trump, and that she testified that she never told Trump “no.”
Merchan heard both sides and ultimately decided that, while “I do think there were guardrails in place” and that “there were some things that probably would have been better off left unsaid,” a mistrial was not yet “warranted.”
Merchan noted, skeptically, that the defense was not nearly quick or vigorous enough to issue objections, suggesting perhaps they were fishing for this set of events and perhaps a mistrial.
“I will note that where there were objections, the objections were for the most part sustained,” Merchan said. “I’ll also notice that I was surprised that there were no more objections.” Merchan ultimately, in fact, put a halt to part of the testimony himself without prompting from the defense “because there was no objection from the defense.”
Merchan also argued that the prosecutors did not overextend, but Daniels herself elaborated on testimony needlessly.
“In fairness to the people, I think the witness was a little difficult to control,” Merchan said. “I tried to control the witness. “It was not easy.”
Prior to restarting direct examination, the judge told the court that Hoffinger was instructing Daniels to “stay focused” and “not provide any unnecessary narrative” in the afternoon’s testimony.
When she came back to answer the rest of the direct questioning, her responses were already much more brief and simple. It doesn’t change the narrative Daniels told: This time, she was testifying about a 2011 threat in a parking lot from a Trump goon that she testified prompted her to seek to sell her story in order to create a paper “trail” for her own safety. “I was afraid that if it wasn’t done before the [election] and things, that I wouldn’t be safe,” she said.
The heaviness of Daniels’ testimony was felt throughout the courtroom and throughout the day. When Eric Trump walked out during the morning break—before most of these fireworks had even happened—he looked absolutely Ashen.
