She walked in wearing all black and a long flowing sweater—her thick heeled boots clacking on her way into the courtroom—a porn star turned political lightning rod ready to deliver damning testimony that could electrify the prosecution of Donald Trump and toss his 2024 presidential campaign into a maelstrom.
Stormy Daniels has finally arrived.
Tuesday marked the 13th day of the former president’s ongoing criminal trial in New York City, which is now in its fourth week. It took that long to put together a jury, have lawyers deliver opposing versions of the story about him paying off an adult film star to keep her quiet about a sexual affair, and have prosecutors present the boring documents that detailed the cover-up.
But the trial has finally moved into the star witness phase, with Daniels taking the stand and describing her private life in Florida and differentiating her stage name from her legal one, Stephanie Clifford.
She described being raised in Christian, conservative Louisiana by a single mom in a “very low-income” household, then briefly studying veterinary medicine at Texas A&M University. In her first few minutes on the stand, prosecutors had her detail her childhood, her love of horseback riding, and had her mostly introduce herself to the jury.
“And then later I went on to dancing,” she said, recalling being short on cash but talented at ballet and tap. It paid better “than shoveling manure eight hours a day.”
Daniels, who prefers the director title but still performs on camera, still actively appears on screen—most recently with names that seem ironically relevant: Axe2Grind, Blast From the Past, and Redemption.
In court, she leaned back while she spoke—her pose belying her anxiety, which came out in her voice. She spoke quickly and her voice shook slightly, never admitting to being nervous but speeding through her testimony and apologizing when a court stenographer asked her to slow down.
Daniels ditched the over-the-top glamour she sports on DVD covers and strip clubs and opted instead for a conservative outfit in court, seemingly dressed for a funeral: no makeup, no flair, and wearing her long blond hair in a messy ponytail with untucked locks dropping on both sides of her dark glasses.
Trump, who wore a navy blue suit and canary yellow tie, remained seated at the defense table whispering with his lawyer Todd Blanche as she spoke.
Earlier in the day, Trump complained on Truth Social that he didn’t even know she would testify until Tuesday morning, before then rushing to delete his post. However, the move to erase his remarks was as asinine as it was paradoxical. New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan has already fined Trump $10,000 and threatened to jail him for repeatedly violating a gag order forbidding him from speaking publicly about witnesses and jurors, and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office specifically adopted the policy of giving him a minimal heads-up to limit the damage he could do by engaging in his signature menacing rhetoric to whip up his raging MAGA followers. It makes even less sense, then, that Trump would whine about the situation by very nearly crossing the very line that led to those limits in the first place.
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