Stormy Daniels on Trump, the Indictment, and What Really Happened in That Nevada Hotel Room

Springtime in Central Florida is balmy as a matter of course, but the weekend after President Donald Trump’s indictment by the Manhattan District Attorney was unusually hot, as though the weather itself had caught the rising fever in American politics. “Normally, I’d say sit outside, but it’s like 90° so we’d better stay in here,” says Stormy Daniels, taking a seat in the red-walled living room of the home she and her husband, Barrett Blade, moved into last year. She prefers to keep the location a secret, in general, and for obvious reasons, but the need for discretion is now acute: In the days since Trump announced on social media that he expected to face arrest connected to his hush money payments to Daniels in 2016, she’s been facing a firehose of death threats. “Gonna kill you, gonna kill your family, gonna set fire to your house…” lists off Blade, rolling his eyes as he hands his wife a chilled can of Coke. “Stormy’s tough, she’s pretty good at laughing things off, but it does get to her, of course.”

On this particular day, however, Stormy Daniels is fretting less about Trump fanatics who may or may not be trying to track her down, than she is about a horse. “OK, so the story is complicated but—I’m not going to cry again—but the short version is, this woman I thought was my friend was taking care of Leo for me, and basically she went behind my back and sold herself my horse, my Irish horse, for $1!” Daniels dabs her eyes, willing away tears; then, in a flash, the anger comes, her loose ponytail whipping vigorously as she shakes her head in disbelief. “So, yeah, basically she stole him. This was the horse I was riding when, I mean, back before the election, before all the… When I was ranked eighth in my division,” she says, referring to her lesser-known life in serious three-day eventing, an equestrian competition that combines riding, dressage, and jumping. “You have to understand: That horse, he was all I had left when everything happened. My whole life turned upside-down. I had to move. My marriage ended. But at least I had Leo…”

Daniels averts her gaze, staring out the glass door to the yard, where her new horse, Redemption, is munching fresh hay in his stall. She fusses with the frills on her navy sundress. Collects herself, and turns back. “Let’s talk about something else. I mean, we’re not here to chat about horses, are we?”

Stormy Daniels is ready to talk about Donald Trump. She’s always been ready: As she points out, she’d told lots of people about her 2006 sexual encounter with Trump at a Nevada resort, and well before the real estate developer-turned-reality star announced his run for president. “I mean he’d call me when I was in hair-and-makeup on shoots and I’d put him on speakerphone—lots of people heard him, lots of people knew,” she says. Stormy is not exactly eager to revisit the tale, but she’s canny enough to realize that if she doesn’t speak up, in the wake of the indictment, her silence will be filled by yet more chatter diminishing her as a fame-seeking, gold-digging porn star out to take down one of the world’s most powerful men. “My name is in the news again, so my merch sales are up—it’s natural, but the way it gets talked about is, like, I’m doing a marketing campaign,” she points out with a sigh. “Meanwhile, he’s out there raising millions of dollars for his campaign on the back of this…” She perceives a double standard. It pisses her off. So do the twinned possibilities that legal jeopardy will play to Trump’s political advantage, and her life will be thrown back into turmoil. “We just bought this house,” she says. “I don’t want to have to move again.”

Stormy Daniels is at once central to Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg’s case against Donald Trump, and peripheral to it. The precise charges Bragg’s office is expected to bring against the former president—and current 2024 presidential candidate—are as yet unknown, but based on the witnesses called to appear before the grand jury, it’s almost certain that they stem from the $130,000 paid to Daniels in 2016. “Paying hush money isn’t illegal,” notes Rebecca Roiphe, Professor of Law at New York University and a former prosecutor for the Manhattan D.A. “And there’s a law in New York about falsifying business records, as happened here, but that’s a misdemeanor—unless the fraud is undertaken to commit or conceal another crime. That’s a felony. But we don’t know yet know the nature of the crime.” Daniels doesn’t know, either: She wasn’t called to testify before the grand jury, and the details of how and why her payment was arranged by former Trump attorney Michael Cohen are as murky to her as they are to the general public. “All I really know is, I got a check,” she says. “And then all hell broke loose.”

Stormy Daniels was already notorious when news of her liaison with Donald Trump hit the news in January 2018, right after his inauguration. But it was a niche notoriety: When she met Trump for the first time at a celebrity golf tournament in Nevada, she was arguably the most successful porn actress in the world—a status attested to by her multiple AVN awards, the adult film industry’s Oscars, and the cameo she had just shot in Judd Apatow’s The 40 Year-Old Virgin. She wasn’t a household name, as she is now, and at the time, Daniels was keen to bridge the chasm between porn stardom and a mainstream career in entertainment—indeed, she remains so, with plans to write and direct a feature film—and Trump dangled just such an opportunity, teasing the possibility that she could appear on his hit series The Celebrity Apprentice. He invited her to have dinner the night of the tournament—his wife, Melania, was at home with their then-infant son Barron—and Daniels arrived at his hotel room with the expectation that they’d be dining downstairs, in one of the resort’s restaurants. Trump answered the door in his pajamas; she smacked him on the ass with a magazine, and told him to get dressed. “People made that out like I was flirting,” Daniels recalls. “I wasn’t. It was like, what are you doing? Put your clothes on.”

Daniels has told this story many times. These days, she’s hyper-focused on correcting some common misconceptions about her tale—like, what she means by “hotel room.” “People think ‘hotel room’ and they think, you walk in and there’s the bed,” she notes. “It wasn’t like that. His room was like a giant apartment—it had a formal dining room! So it didn’t seem completely insane for me to hang out there, or for him to suggest we order up food…. I never got the sense he was trying to seduce me. He’d put on his suit, and we were just talking, he was asking me questions about my work. Good questions.” Daniels interrupts herself with a bark of laughter. “He was smart! Not, like, Einstein, but—like, he spoke in whole sentences.” For a moment, Daniels seems to disappear into her recollection, as if trying to connect the man, Donald Trump, who chatted with her that night, to the larger-than-life figure who has turned American politics on its head. “Sometimes I see him on TV and I’m like—what happened? Who even is that guy?” She goggles her eyes for effect. “I’m as confused by his hold over people as everyone else.”

What happened next in that hotel room is, in part, a blank. It’s also the oh-so-brief chapter of the Stormy Daniels/Donald Trump saga that Daniels has been mulling over since she did her first round of media appearances in 2018. Back then, she seemed happy to joke about Trump’s appendage—mushroom-like, in her estimation—and his average-ness as a lover, and to brush off any intimation that she’d been victimized, that she was another #MeToo case study. As she told Amy Chozick, who profiled her in the August 2018 issue of Vogue, her status as a Resistance poster girl rankled; it made for an uneasy fit with her offscreen lifestyle, as a registered Republican living in Texas, among friends who liked horses, and unregulated capitalism, and guns. Moreover, she says now, she felt she was disrespected by many of her would-be allies—one sticking point, Daniels notes, was the use of her legal name, Stephanie Clifford. “It was like, ‘she’s not a porn star,’ she’s a woman, say her name!” She throws up her hands, for emphasis. “My name is Stormy Daniels! And I am a porn star! What annoyed me was that they didn’t say, and she’s a porn-writer/director, too.”