Porn actoress Stormy Daniels is facing more questions Thursday at Donald Trump’s New York trial about her claim of a 2006 sexual encounter with him and allegations he then paid her $130,000 in 2016 to stay quiet about it just as voters headed to the polls in his successful run for the White House.
Daniels told the 12-member jury on Tuesday that she hates Trump, wants the former president “to be held accountable” and sent to jail if he is found guilty.
Trump, the first former president to face criminal charges, has denied Daniels’ account of a one-night tryst at a celebrity golf tourney at Lake Tahoe in the state of Nevada and all 34 charges he is facing. If convicted, he could be placed on probation or imprisoned for up to four years.
He is accused of falsifying business records at his Trump Organization real estate conglomerate to hide reimbursement of the $130,000 hush money payment to Daniels by sending monthly checks in 2017 to Michael Cohen, his former lawyer and political fixer, who sent the money to Daniels out of his personal home equity line of credit.
Trump claims he made the reimbursement payments to Cohen for his legal work. The Trump defense lawyers have suggested that the hush money payments to the porn film star were meant to hide Daniels’ claim of sex with Trump from his wife, Melania, not to influence the outcome of the 2016 election.
Defense lawyer Susan Necheles engaged in a contentious, hourslong cross-examination of Daniels on Tuesday, accusing her of lying over the last several years about her claims of the sexual encounter with Trump, when he was 60 and she 27, in his hotel suite at the golf resort, and trying to capitalize on it financially.
Daniels acknowledged she has no intention of paying Trump $560,000 in legal fees she owes him from defamation cases a former lawyer filed against Trump and lost.
Necheles accused Daniels of seeking to extort Trump through the hush money deal.
“False,” Daniels retorted.
“That’s what you did, right?” Necheles repeated.
“False!” Daniels said, almost yelling in the courtroom.
The defense attorney also accused Daniels of fabricating a story about an unidentified man threatening her and her young daughter in a Las Vegas parking lot in 2011, telling her to stop talking about her liaison with Trump.
“The whole story was made up, wasn’t it?” Necheles asked.
“No, none of it was made up,” Daniels fired back sharply. The man who Daniels said threatened her has never been identified.
When Necheles finishes her cross-examination of Daniels on Thursday, prosecutor Susan Hoffinger says she also will have more questions for Daniels.
Trump, sitting at the defense table a short distance from the witness stand, at times has been visibly angry at Daniels’ account.
On Tuesday, the trial transcript showed that New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan huddled with Trump defense lawyer Todd Blanche and prosecutors and told Blanche, “I understand that your client is upset at this point, but he is cursing audibly, and he is shaking his head visually, and that’s contemptuous. It has the potential to intimidate the witness, and the jury can see that.”
Blanche assured the judge he would speak to Trump to get him to stop making comments from the defense table.
