Stormy Daniels and the 'Slut Defense'

A dispatch from the People v. Donald Trump.

You’re reading Wait, Really?, a newsletter about gender politics and cultural absurdities. I’ve been reporting from the Trump trial the past couple of weeks, which you may have noticed. Thanks for reading, and back to slightly lighter programming soon.

First, they tried to paint her as an opportunist who was in it for the money. Then, they worked to discredit her as dishonest, highlighting discrepancies in how she’s told her story over years.

Finally, on Thursday, during the final day of testimony from Stormy Daniels, the porn actress and director at the center of the hush money case against Donald Trump, Trump’s lawyers went for what is perhaps the oldest trope in the book: They harped on her sexual history, cast her as nutty, and implied that, as a porn actress, she should have been used to a man stripping down to his underwear.

Stormy Daniels in 2018 (Yana Paskova/Getty)

“You’ve acted and had sex in over 200 porn movies, right?” asked Trump’s lawyer, Susan Necheles, who was outfitted in a pink suit for the occasion. “And there are naked men and women having sex, including yourself, in those movies?”

“Correct,” Daniels replied.

“And yet according to you, seeing a man on a bed in a T-shirt and boxers was so upsetting that you got lightheaded?”

Daniels didn’t miss a beat: “When you are not expecting a man twice your age in his underwear, absolutely.”

Call it the “slutty and nutty” defense — a phrase made famous by David Brock, who used it to smear Anita Hill. But this was 2024, not 1991, and Daniels — porn star, author, podcaster, and the woman Trump is accused of committing 34 felony acts to shut up about their sexual encounter — was not backing down.

During more than eight hours of combative questioning, over two days in a criminal courthouse in lower Manhattan, Daniels was largely unflappable. Compared to Hope Hicks and Madeleine Westerhout, former Trump staffers who each cried on the witness stand, defending “the man that I got to know,” as Westerhout put it, Daniels was poised, confident, believable.

But about midway through her cross-examination, on the second day of testimony, the tenor and the language shifted noticeably.

Donald Trump in 2024 (Getty Images)

Suddenly, Daniels was no longer “you,” she was “you and the other porn stars” — as if to emphasize the sordid company she keeps. Trump’s lawyer, Necheles, described how she was “selling herself” when she made appearances at exotic clubs during her “Make America Horny Again” tour — emphasis on “selling.” (Daniels is a porn star, not a prostitute.) She asked derisively about Daniels’ work as a “medium” who talks “to dead people,” referring to a TV show she worked on about the paranormal, an obvious attempt to make her seem wacky.

Necheles also hammered her on her “affair” with a cameraman from the recent “Stormy” film, which happened while she was separated from her then-husband. (This was indeed an odd detail revealed in the Peacock documentary, but more for him than her; he was a journalist who had met Daniels in that capacity and covered her for Rolling Stone.)

But the show-stopping exchange came when Trump’s attorney seemed to equate Daniels’ porn work — not as an actor, but as a writer and director — with making up a story about having sex with her client.

“You have a lot of experience making phony stories about sex appear to be real,” Necheles said.

“Wow,” Daniels replied, taken aback. “That’s not how I’d put it.” She took a long pause, then said: “The sex in those films is very much real, just like what happened to me in that room.”

To be clear, Stormy Daniels is not on trial. The bad sex she claims she had with Donald Trump in his Lake Tahoe hotel suite in 2006 is not on trial, either. But as I watched, I wondered if the line of questioning would backfire, even in a case about falsifying business records.

The idea that Daniels’s pornography career could be equated with making up a story — or used to undermine it — might have been convincing in a pre-#MeToo world. But the public perception of sex work has changed a lot since Daniels’ story was revealed, as has the way the public understands how people can react to trauma.

Daniels, meanwhile, was defiant — unashamed of how she’s made her career. A natural storyteller, she pushed back on small details — “show me where I said that,” she said repeatedly — and proclaimed Trump’s lawyers were “trying to put words in my mouth.”

Her one-liners often drew snickers: When the defense accused her of profiting on her story by selling merchandise, she quipped: “Not unlike Mr. Trump.” To a question about “paranormal” activities she once claimed had occurred at her house, she joked that most had been “debunked as a giant possum that was under the house.” At one point she even made Trump’s lawyers laugh, by rolling her eyes and saying she was “pretty sure we all know” how to have sex.

The irony of trying to shame a woman like Stormy Daniels, during the trial of a man who boasts about grabbing women by the pussy, has been found liable for sexual assault, and once bragged he had so much sex that avoiding STDs was “my personal Vietnam,” is so glaring as to almost seem unwise. But as many of the journalists in the courthouse noted, as we walked out at the end of the day, it seems at times that Trump’s lawyers are performing for an audience of one.

And Daniels, for her part, was utterly unapologetic: She is a woman who proudly makes pornography for a living and doesn’t believe it hurts her credibility one bit.

In fact, maybe it even helps. Because in the same way you can’t discredit a man who has built himself on falsehoods, can you ever really shame a woman who is proudly pro-sex?