Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, is a 44-year-old adult film star from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She has been a well-known personality in the adult film industry for more than two decades, appearing in and directing numerous videos. Daniels claims to have had a sexual encounter with Donald Trump in 2006, a year after he married his current wife Melania, and over a decade before he became US president. The alleged relationship is at the center of a Manhattan grand jury’s investigation of Trump that involves $130,000 in hush money paid to Daniels on the eve of his 2016 election.
According to Daniels, she was introduced to Trump in July 2006 at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe. Trump invited her to dinner, and they dined at his hotel suite, where he showed her a copy of a golf magazine with his picture on the cover. Daniels claims that Trump asked her about herself and whether she would like to appear on his TV show “Celebrity Apprentice.” She also alleges that Trump made telephone calls to her over the following year and that she met him again at his request in July 2007 at the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles to discuss her possible appearance on the show.
On October 28, 2016, days before the presidential election that Trump won, Daniels signed a non-disclosure agreement in which she pledged not to publicly discuss her relationship with him in exchange for a $130,000 payment. The agreement was signed by Keith Davidson, her lawyer at the time, and Michael Cohen, then Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer. The document included a spot for Trump’s signature, but he never signed it. In 2018, after the Wall Street Journal reported on the payment to Daniels, Cohen stated publicly that he paid her using his own money and was not directed to do so by Trump. Cohen later testified in court that Trump directed him to make the payment.
Daniels sued Trump and Cohen seeking to have the non-disclosure agreement invalidated. Trump’s lawyers subsequently acknowledged he did not sign the agreement and would not seek to enforce it. A judge dismissed her lawsuit because the matter was resolved.
In 2018, Daniels filed a defamation lawsuit against Trump in federal court over a Twitter post in which he accused her of a “con job” after she described being threatened over publicizing her account of the alleged sexual relationship with him. A Los Angeles-based federal judge decided in 2018 that Trump’s remarks were not defamatory and were protected by the US Constitution’s First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. The judge’s decision was upheld on appeal, and the US Supreme Court declined to review the matter in 2021.
Daniels has also claimed that an unknown man approached her and her infant daughter in 2011 in a Las Vegas parking lot and made threats after she agreed to talk about her relationship with Trump in a media interview. In 2018, she released a sketch of the man. Trump responded on Twitter to the release of the sketch, writing: “A sketch years later about a nonexistent man. A total con job, playing the Fake News Media for Fools (but they know it)!”
