The President and the Porn Star

A dispatch from Manhattan criminal court.

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He promised her dinner … but they never ate. He told her she reminded him of his daughter … then stripped down to his boxers and a T-shirt while she was in the bathroom. He said he could help her career with a spot on his TV show … then scolded her, “I thought you were serious,” when she tried to leave.

She was 26, had grown up poor, and was trying to expand her career beyond pornography — she wanted to be a writer and director. He was 60, a business mogul, and would go on to become the president of the United States.

Stormy Daniels has never accused Donald Trump of anything but a payoff. She has maintained that the sex they had in his Lake Tahoe hotel suite in 2006 — where he was for a golf tournament, and she was promoting her adult film company — was consensual, albeit unenjoyable. (Trump has denied the sex occurred.)

Please enjoy my bad iphone photos... view from the line outside Manhattan Criminal Court at 100 Center Street.

But as I sat in the packed Manhattan courthouse where Trump is being tried on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, watching Daniels testify about the sexual encounter she has often joked about, the whole thing sounded lot darker, and murkier, that it had before.

Daniels took the witness stand on Tuesday dressed in all black, with her hair gathered loosely in a clip, wearing glasses. With Trump staring stone-faced straight ahead, occasionally grimacing and whispering to his lawyers, Daniels spoke confidently, gesturing with her hands, at times talking so fast that the judge had to ask her to slow down, and cracking jokes.

“You know, what could possibly go wrong?” she quipped, as she described accepting Trump’s invitation to dinner.

Despite a promise by the prosecution to omit “salacious” details about the sexual encounter itself — including any “descriptions of genitalia” — things took a darker turn when Daniels described what came immediately before and after it.

She recalled that Trump was wearing silk or satin pajamas when she met him at his hotel suite, and she ribbed him for looking like Hugh Hefner. (He changed.) They discussed the business side of the porn industry, including pay, residuals and unions, and whether actors received health insurance and STD testing, which they did, she said, every 30 days. “He was very interested in some of the business aspects of it, which I thought was cool,” Daniels said.

They also talked about his family, including his daughter — who he said she reminded him of. “She is smart and blonde and beautiful and people underestimate her as well,” she recounted him saying. They briefly discussed his wife; Daniels said Trump told her they didn’t “even sleep in the same room” — prompting him to shake his head and mutter “bullshit” to his lawyers.

Then she asked to use the restroom. She peeked inside his toiletry bag on her way out (“I’m not proud of it,” she said with a laugh, noting that it contained Pert Plus and Old Spice) before emerging to find him on the bed undressed.

Trump was not threatening during the sexual encounter, she said — though he was standing between she and the door. She did not say no to sex with him — “I didn’t say anything at all,” she testified — but she also didn’t consent to him not using a condom. She kept in contact with him for years after, even meeting him at another hotel room another time (they did not have sex) because she wanted to expand her career, and he was dangling an opportunity to appear on “The Apprentice.”

And yet at times, watching Daniels testify as the crowd sat in riveted silence, the words she used to describe the encounter were reminiscent of so many of the other stories of women who have come forward to accuse Trump of sexual misconduct:

She said she “blacked out,” then laid there naked, staring up at the ceiling. She “felt like the room spun in slow motion,” and that the blood left her hands and feet.  When it was over, she said, she fumbled with her shoes — gold strappy heels she had trouble fastening because her hands were shaking so violently.

Ultimately she blamed herself: “I just thought, ‘Oh my god, what did I misread to get here?’”

To be clear, the sexual encounter between Trump and Daniels is not what is on trial here. What’s on trial is the alleged payout that came after it. And yet the details of it remain at the center of a case that could not only shape U.S. history, but tell us yet again about sexual entitlement of a man who is the presumptive Republican nominee.

Daniels will return to the stand on Thursday.

For those following my bathroom dispatches (no photos allowed inside the court or overflow room)... please enjoy the view.

Kind of an odd spot for a TP roll, no?