Though he would surely prefer it to be otherwise, Stormy Daniels isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. On Sunday, March 25, 22 million viewers tuned in to CBS’ “60 Minutes” for Anderson Cooper’s exclusive interview with Stormy, who offered specific details about her sexual encounter with Donald Trump in 2006. She also noted that she signed that now-infamous “nondisclosure agreement” drafted by Trump attorney Michael Cohen in 2016 because she felt threatened.
Trump, through Cohen, allegedly paid Stormy $130,000 just prior to the 2016 presidential election to ensure her silence. On March 12 of this year, Stormy (through her attorney Michael Avenatti) offered to pay back the $130,000 in order to be able to speak freely about the “affair.” Neither Trump nor his attorneys responded to this offer … but on March 25, that nondisclosure didn’t seem to matter. Stormy, a former ED’s Overall Entertainer of the Year nominee and ED award winner, was telling all to Cooper.
Said Stormy on 60 Minutes, “He was like, ‘Wow, you — you are special. You remind me of my daughter.’ You know — he was like, ‘You’re smart and beautiful, and a woman to be reckoned with, and I like you. I like you.’” As reported on NPR.org, Stormy also noted that she did not want to have sex with Trump after going to his hotel room alone with him, but she said she “was not a victim.”
“I realized exactly what I’d gotten myself into,” she said in the interview. “And I was like, ‘Ugh, here we go.’ And I just felt like maybe — it was sort of — I had it coming for making a bad decision for going to someone’s room alone and I just heard the voice in my head, ‘Well, you put yourself in a bad situation and bad things happen, so you deserve this.’ “
Stormy also went on to describe a situation in 2011 where she was physically threatened by a man in a parking lot after agreeing to be paid $15,000 for an interview with In Touch magazine about the alleged affair.
“”I was in a parking lot, going to a fitness class with my infant daughter. Taking, you know, the seats facing backwards in the backseat, diaper bag, you know, gettin’ all the stuff out. And a guy walked up on me and said to me, ‘Leave Trump alone. Forget the story,’ ” Daniels said. “And then he leaned around and looked at my daughter and said, ‘That’s a beautiful little girl. It’d be a shame if something happened to her mom.’ And then he was gone.”
It is unclear whether or not President Trump watched Stormy’s 60 Minutes interview, but it has been widely reported that he was in Washington D.C. while his wife, Melania, was in Florida when the show aired. Trump has repeatedly denied the sexual encounter with Stormy, but the fact that Cohen has never denied the existence of the nondisclosure agreement certainly prompts one to wonder why there would be a nondisclosure agreement for something that never happened in the first place.
But the 60 Minutes interview certainly wasn’t the end of the “storm.” On March 26, a day after the interview, Stormy and Avenatti announced that she is suing Cohen for defamation. The suit against both Trump and Cohen was amended in the U.S. District Court in California, asking for a jury trial to settle the claim of defamation against Cohen.
Stormy’s suit says that Cohen defamed her when he put out a statement in February regarding the $130,000 payment he made to her just before the election, allegedly in exchange for her silence, according to a story on NPR.org. In that statement to the media, Cohen said, “Just because something isn’t true doesn’t mean that it can’t cause you harm or damage.”
In Stormy’s lawsuit, her attorney argues thusly: “It was reasonably understood by those who read or heard the statement that Mr. Cohen’s defamatory statement was about Ms. Clifford. Both on its face, and because of the facts and circumstances known to persons who read or heard the statement, it was reasonably understood Mr. Cohen meant to convey that Ms. Clifford is a liar, someone who should not be trusted, and that her claims about her relationship with Mr. Trump is ‘something [that] isn’t true.’ “
Of course, we all know this isn’t the end of this story. Stay tuned for further updates on The Pub!
