The New Yorker:

Testimony from the adult-film actor moved the ex-President’s lawyers to call for a mistrial.

By Eric Lach

Tuesday morning, at Donald Trump’s criminal trial, an Assistant District Attorney rose and said the words everyone had been waiting to hear: “The people call Stormy Daniels.” This case has always been surreal; it concerns hush money that was paid to Daniels, an adult-film actor, in 2016. But, until Daniels strolled jauntily into the courtroom today, the improbable, grubby reality of the whole affair had yet to come into focus.

For several hours, Daniels took the court through her story, from her childhood in Louisiana to her ventures in the adult-film industry. Then she recounted the fateful day, in 2006, when she met the future President at a celebrity golf tournament. At the time, Daniels was under contract with a company called Wicked Pictures. “Wicked sponsored one of the holes on the golf course,” Daniels said. “It was funny, one of the adult-film companies sponsoring one of the holes.”

Some reporters in the gallery chuckled, but no one else in the courtroom smiled—not the judge, not the prosecutors, not the defendant, nor his lawyers. The members of the jury seemed to behold Daniels with curiosity, and to take her words seriously. Daniels answered the prosecutor Susan Hoffinger’s questions gamely, and sometimes in more detail than Judge Juan Merchan wanted, which repeatedly prompted Trump’s lawyer Susan Necheles to object. Daniels gave an elaborate description of the hotel suite she said Trump invited her to, down to the black-and-white tile floor in the foyer. She detailed the nearly two hours of conversation that she and Trump shared in the dining room of the suite. She said that Trump asked her about the adult-film industry, but that, unlike most people, he was less interested in the sordid details than the practicalities. “Are there any unions? Do you get residuals?” she recalled him asking. What about testing, he wanted to know. Was she worried about S.T.D.s?

When Daniels talked about spanking Trump with a magazine, some of the jurors finally cracked. At Merchan’s urging, Hoffinger asked Daniels to be as brief as possible in describing sex between the two. Daniels said they had been in the “missionary position.” Necheles objected, again. Merchan sustained the objection. Later, Daniels testified that Trump did not wear a condom. “Was that concerning to you?” Hoffinger asked, to which Daniels replied, “Yes.” When Hoffinger asked why Daniels didn’t say anything about it, Daniels told her, “I didn’t say anything at all.”

For much of Daniels’s testimony, Trump sat looking away from her. Before lunch, Hoffinger asked Daniels to discuss the details of the hush-money payment she received from Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen a few days before the 2016 election. In her telling, she accepted a hundred and thirty thousand dollars in exchange for her silence mostly because she didn’t want her then partner to find out about the encounter. “I didn’t care about the amount—it was just to get it done,” Daniels said. “The number didn’t matter to me.”

After the lunch break, Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche requested a mistrial. He said that Daniels’s testimony had been extremely embarrassing to Trump. “How can we come back from this in a way that is fair for President Trump?” he asked Merchan. The judge allowed that Daniels had said some things on the stand that would have been better left “unsaid.” “In fairness to the people, I think the witness was a little difficult to control,” Merchan noted. But he did not grant the mistrial. “The remedy,” he said, “is on cross-examination.” Daniels is expected to testify through Thursday.

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