The defense team goes up against Stormy Daniels. - Pornographic questioning during Trump's court case
The ongoing criminal trial against former President and Republican candidate Donald Trump (77) for concealing hush money payments has witnessed the continuation of the cross-examination of key witness Stormy Daniels (45).
On Tuesday, the porn star had transformed the trial into a captivating erotic story as she testified in vivid detail about a sexual encounter with the defendant in a hotel suite back in 2006. Daniels described Trump in boxer shorts and had intercourse without a condom in the missionary position.
The explicit portrayal of sex could have been counterproductive for the prosecution. The jurors seemed agitated. Donald Trump's attorney Susan Necheles attempted to depict Daniels as a "greed-driven blackmailer" during her questioning. However, Daniels insisted that she had secured the money deal with Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen (57) in 2016 for her own safety: "Else, I would have been a target ..."
Necheles, meanwhile, tried to portray Daniels as a blackmailer who called her lawyer a "pussy" during the payment delay and warned about loss of leverage and the story being worth nothing. Trump's legal team wanted to insinuate Daniels had used the impending election as an opportunity to threaten Cohen with releasing the story.
Her downfall started in 2018 when the Wall Street Journal reported on the affair. Daniels quickly skyrocketed as a media icon, appeared on "60 Minutes" (CBS), earned a 800,000-dollar book deal, toured strip clubs (titled "Make America Horny Again"), and starred in a reality TV show and a documentary. She capitalized on opportunities furnished by her "intense animosity" towards Trump. She boasted on Twitter about her "instrumental role" in getting Trump behind bars. When Trump was impeached in 2023, Daniels celebrated by selling merchandise, including "Stormy, Saint of Impeachment" scented candles.
The defense team was keen on discrediting Daniels and her controversial claims:
► In her interviews, she had spoken of a "dinner in the room" that she now claims never happened.
► Daniels had fainted upon seeing Trump in boxer shorts and T-shirt in bed, indicating surprise from someone in the adult film industry, her questioning attorney implied.
► As a witness, Daniels said that Trump had assumed a "intimidating" position, which implied coercion. However, this detail was absent from her previous statements, according to Trump's lawyer. Daniels had previously claimed that she had "made Trump her bitch" during "small talk." If that was true, Necheles asked, then why was she intimidated?
With the jury shown a poster of Daniels in skimpy lingerie in this round of the "sex trial," Team Trump managed to question the credibility of the star witness's salacious statements. However, the final verdict from the jury is yet to be seen.
Read also:
- Police investigating a mafia hit squad in Rotterdam.
- Loan players Sancho and Maatsen of BVB face an uncertain fate.
- Conflict in Ukraine: the current status
- Riedle draws a comparison between BVB and the 1997 championship squad.
Source: symclub.org
