When Donald Trump’s attorney Susan Necheles tried to discredit the adult film actor Stormy Daniels on the stand during Trump’s hush money trial earlier this week, she took this absurd position: Assume a sex worker has no integrity.
“You have a lot of experience making phony stories about sex appear to be real?” Necheles asked.
“Wow,” Daniels said. “That’s not how I would put it. The sex in the films is very much real, just like what happened to me in that room.”
Daniels’ response was smart and quick and left Necheles trying to catch up after her question backfired. The defense attorney should have known it would. The trademark of porn is real sex. And the idea that working in porn automatically makes you a liar or some amoral person is deeply offensive — a vestige of antiquated attitudes about sex work and what women, in particular, should and should not do with their lives.
“That room” Daniels mentioned referred to the Lake Tahoe hotel room where, she says, she and Trump had consensual sex in 2006. At issue in the court case is whether Trump falsified business records to cover up what prosecutors say are reimbursements of hush money payments made to Daniels in an illegal attempt to influence the 2016 election. Trump denies the whole thing, including that he had sex with Daniels. So her credibility is something his lawyer wants to chip away at.
Daniels has been successful as an actor, a director and a writer in the adult film industry, and she is unapologetic about her work and her ambition. Her integrity doesn’t rest on whether her industry is liked or despised. Hopefully the jurors will get that. I hold her in higher regard than I do the CEOs in respected industries whom we have assumed, based on the prestige of their position, were honest and honorable only to find out they weren’t. Disgraced — and imprisoned — CEOs Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried come to mind. So much for assumptions.
Daniels did try to sell her story to news outlets before Trump and his then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, allegedly, came along with a hush money offer of $130,000. So she’s transactional. (So is Trump.) That isn’t evidence of lying. Necheles is also drilling down on supposed inconsistencies in Daniels’ accounts of the evening she spent with Trump. That’s fair game.
Accusing Daniels of concocting the whole sex story with Trump because she’s a porn star who has sex on screen for a living is not.
