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Stormy Daniels Says She Stayed Silent on Trump Out of Fear
By
JIM RUTENBERGMARCH 25, 2018
Stephanie Clifford, the adult film star known as Stormy Daniels, told “60 Minutes” that a man threatened her after she agreed to a tell a magazine about an affair with Donald J. Trump. Ms. Clifford said the man told her: “Leave Trump alone. Forget the story.”
CBS News, via Associated Press
The adult film star Stephanie Clifford told “60 Minutes” that she struck a $130,000 deal for her silence about an alleged affair with Donald J. Trump in the final days of the 2016 campaign because she was worried about her safety and that of her young daughter.
That concern, she told “60 Minutes” in an interview for broadcast on Sunday night, was based on
a threat she received in 2011 from a man who approached her in Las Vegas. She said the threat came after she sold her story about Mr. Trump for $15,000 to InTouch magazine, which decided not to run it after Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, threatened to sue the publication.
“I was in a parking lot going to a fitness class with my infant daughter,” she told the “60 Minutes” correspondent and CNN host Anderson Cooper, according to a transcript of the interview. “And a guy walked up on me and said to me, ‘Leave Trump alone. Forget the story.’ And he leaned round and looked at my daughter and said, ‘That’s a beautiful little girl, it would be a shame if something happened to her mom.”
So when her previous lawyer came to her with an offer brokered by Mr. Cohen in the final days of the presidential campaign, she said, she agreed because, “I was concerned for my family and their safety.”
Ms. Clifford, known professionally as Stormy Daniels, was the featured subject of what was the most highly anticipated episode of “60 Minutes” in its recent history, turning her story about a consensual relationship with the president into something of a national event, one replete with viewing parties and “Dark and Stormy” cocktail specials at bars. She is one of two women who have recently filed suit seeking to get out of agreements they said they entered during the last stretch of the 2016 campaign to give up the rights to their stories about what they have said were affairs with Mr. Trump. The other woman, a former Playmate named Karen McDougal, sold her rights to the company that owns The National Enquirer, and spoke to Mr. Cooper on CNN on Thursday.
Both cases present potentially consequential legal challenges for Mr. Trump, forming the basis of complaints that have been filed with the Federal Election Commission and the Justice Department saying that the payments constituted illegal campaign contributions.
Ms. Clifford’s appearance on “60 Minutes” showed that the effort to keep her story from public view had failed spectacularly — just as statements from Mr. Cohen that he would collect some $20 million in damages from her for violating the hush agreement had not kept her from appearing on what is often the highest-rated program on television news.
Asked by Mr. Cooper why she was taking the legally risky route of sitting for a nationally televised interview, she said, “I was perfect fine saying nothing at all, but I’m not O.K. with being made out to be a liar.”
Ms. Clifford had first threatened to speak out in February, after, she said, Mr. Cohen broke his part of the previously secret 2016 agreement by telling The New York Times that he had paid the $130,000 from his own pocket. He has denied Mr. Trump had an affair with Ms. Clifford.
The White House was quiet ahead of the airing of Ms. Clifford’s interview, though an ally of Mr. Trump’s, the Newsmax founder and editor in chief, Christopher Ruddy, told ABC News earlier on Sunday that Mr. Trump considered her story “a political hoax.” Mr. Trump spent the evening before the interview dining at his club in Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago, with Mr. Cohen.
Ms. Clifford said during the interview that while she had seen Mr. Trump more than once, she had had sex with him a single time, unprotected. That happened shortly after they met at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe in 2006. (Ms. McDougal has also said that she, too, was intimate with Mr. Trump during that event.) Mr. Trump was 60 at the time; Ms. Clifford was 27.
Ms. Clifford said that Mr. Trump had invited her to his hotel suite for dinner, and that their banter began with him showing her a magazine cover featuring his photograph. “I was like, ‘Someone should take that magazine and spank you with it,”’ she said. “So he turned around and pulled his pants down a little — you know, had underwear on and stuff, and I just gave him a couple swats.”
It was done in a joking manner she said, and the flirtation —
which included Mr. Trump comparing Ms. Clifford to his daughter — led to intercourse, though, she said, she had not been particularly attracted to Mr. Trump.
“He said that it was great,” she said, and told her he had had “a great evening, and it was nothing like he expected, that I really surprised him, that a lot of people must underestimate me — that he hoped that I would be willing to see him again, and that we would discuss the things we had talked about earlier in the evening.”
Mr. Trump, she said, had raised the possibility that he get her onto his reality show, “Celebrity Apprentice” but it would not come to be.
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