At times, jurors reacted to the back and forth as if they were watching a tennis match, whipping their heads between watching Daniels and Necheles.
Here were five highlights:
‘Wow’
At one point, Necheles bluntly suggested that Daniels’s long career in adult films made her predisposed to make up things about sex — including her encounter with Trump.
“You have a lot of experience making phony stories about sex appear to be real?” Necheles asked, suggesting that Daniels made up the details of her sexual encounter with Trump.
“Wow,” Daniels said, then added: “If that story were untrue, I would have written it to be a lot better.”
‘You’re trying to trick me’
At multiple points, Necheles suggested Daniels had changed her story about the 2006 incident with Trump over the years — and Daniels pushed back.
After Necheles proposed that Daniels’s description of sex with Trump had “completely changed,” Daniels angrily told the lawyer, “You’re trying to make me say it’s changed, but it hasn’t changed.”
In another moment, an exasperated Daniels told Necheles that she was “trying to trick me into saying something that’s not entirely true.”
Trump in his underwear
Necheles pressed Daniels on her previous comments that she was so shaken when she saw Trump sitting in his hotel room in 2006 that she became lightheaded and almost fainted.
“When you are not expecting a man twice your age in his underwear, absolutely,” Daniels said.
Necheles, invoking Daniels’s longtime work in sex-related industries, asked her whether it was “the first time in your life that someone made a pass at you.” Daniels said no, but the encounter stood out for how much larger and older Trump was.
‘Make America Horny Again’
Another topic that fueled tension between the two was the slogan for Daniels’s 2018 tour of strip clubs: “Make America Horny Again.”
Necheles argued that the slogan showed Daniels was glad to promote her connection to Trump. Daniels has said she hated the slogan and had never posted it herself, even if some promoters had.
But on Thursday, Necheles presented two Instagram posts where Daniels used the slogan, and the witness conceded she had in fact posted it.
Stormy Saint of Indictments
The strip-club tour slogan was not the only example that Necheles latched on to argue that Daniel was out to capitalize on her affiliation with Trump. Necheles said Daniels used the affiliation to sell souvenirs online, including a “Stormy Saint of Indictments” candle.
Daniels retorted that it was “not unlike Mr. Trump,” an apparent reference to Trump’s campaign using his legal troubles to sell merchandise, like a T-shirt with his mug shot.
After Necheles said most of what Daniels was selling was “bragging about how you got President Trump indicted,” the actress held her hands to her chest in what looked like mock surprise and replied, “I got President Trump indicted?”
