The former porn actress Steffany Clifford, known as ‘Stormy Daniels’, stated this Tuesday during her testimony as a witness in the trial against former President of the United States Donald Trump for bribery that the magnate did not verbally or physically attack her when they had sexual relations, if Well, there was an obvious “power imbalance” between the parties.
“I told very few people that we had had a sexual relationship because I was ashamed for not stopping it (in time),” he explained in court, adding that, after their encounter, he left “as quickly as he could.”
The former porn actress has detailed that Trump did not give her money or his phone “or anything like that,” while he did not ask her to keep the meeting confidential or express concern for his wife, Melania Trump, as reported by CNN.
Clifford has said that she met the former president in 2006 during a golf tournament in Lake Tahoe. “It was a very brief meeting,” she stressed, adding that her impression was that she was just as old as her father, who was 60 years old at the time.
Donald Trump’s bodyguard, Keith Schiller, asked the actress if she wanted to have dinner with the magnate, to which she declined the invitation. Later, her publicist encouraged her to attend the meeting. “She really didn’t have any expectations,” she noted.
During dinner, Trump asked her about her personal life, including her family, and also about her work, especially her sexual health. “He was very interested in many details of my business, which I found very interesting,” he said, adding that they briefly talked about his wife, Melania Trump, with whom he did not sleep in the same room.
THE CASE
The Prosecutor’s Office accuses Trump of 34 crimes for alleged document falsification, within a plot with which he would have tried to hide the payment of $130,000 to Stormy Daniels to buy her silence and not talk about the extramarital relationship they had within the framework of the 2016 election campaign.
The charges Trump faces date back to an investigation launched by the Manhattan district attorney’s office following an alleged plan by the magnate to bury several sex scandals in the media.
In May 2011, Clifford agreed to tell her story to a magazine in exchange for $15,000, although she herself explained in an interview given in 2018 to the CBS television program ’60 Minutes’ that a man threatened her while she was going with her daughter to a gymnastics class and decided not to do it.
Trump’s emergence into politics five years later led to the dusting off of the scandals that had accompanied the magnate during his long public career. The porn actress ended up signing a confidentiality agreement of $130,000 in exchange for not revealing this alleged extramarital relationship with the mogul and she stated that she did it because she feared for her safety.
Trump’s then-lawyer Michael Cohen, who was also vice president of the Trump Organization, arranged the payment by providing said amount from his own pocket and the former president returned the amount hidden in various legal expenses within the company’s records. Cohen was sentenced in December 2018 to three years in prison.
On the other hand, two more secret payments also appear in the scheme: about $150,000 for the model Karen McDougal, who had supposedly had an extramarital relationship, and $30,000 for a former exporter who claimed to know a story of dubious veracity about a son who would have had outside of marriage, which was later discovered to be false.
Both would have received the aforementioned payments so that the tabloid National Enquirer, published by American Media Inc. (AMI) and favorable to the former president, could buy the rights to these two stories so that they would not come to light.
