Written by Michael Rothfeld
The seeds of Donald Trump’s indictment by the Manhattan district attorney’s office were planted 17 years ago, at a celebrity golf tournament in Nevada, where he met Stormy Daniels in July 2006.
At the time, Trump was the 60-year-old star of “The Apprentice,” a reality show in which contestants competed in a test of their business acumen. She was a 27-year-old pornographic film star and director.
According to Daniels’ account, Trump invited her to his hotel room for dinner. As they chatted, he told her he could make her a guest on his show, and the evening turned intimate. Trump denies that any of that occurred.
As Daniels tells it, Trump called her occasionally after that night, nicknaming her “Honeybunch.” They saw each other at least twice more in 2007, but they did not sleep together again. And Trump never put her on “The Apprentice.”
Then, in 2011, as Trump explored a campaign for the presidency, Daniels — bitter over his purported broken promise — looked into selling the story of their liaison, according to her account and people involved in the events. Through an agent, she negotiated a $15,000 deal with Life & Style, a celebrity magazine, giving an interview and passing a lie-detector test. But when the magazine called Trump’s company for comment, his fixer, Michael Cohen, threatened to sue, killing the story.
Trump, for his part, dropped his plans to run for president and continued hosting “The Apprentice.”
That October, Daniels’ story about Trump surfaced briefly, after her agent, Gina Rodriguez, leaked it to a gossip blog called “The Dirty,” trying to gin up interest from a paying publication. A couple of media outlets followed up on the blog post. But no one paid, Daniels denied the story and a lawyer had the post taken down.
In spring 2016, with Trump running for president for real, Daniels’ agent approached media outlets, including The National Enquirer, to sell her story again. But they had no takers, in part because she had denied it was true back in 2011.
The dynamics changed a month before the election. On Oct. 7, 2016, The Washington Post published the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Trump, unwittingly on a live microphone, was recorded describing in lewd terms how he groped women.
The people surrounding Daniels immediately realised that the tape made Trump vulnerable. After the emergence of the recording, the disclosure that he had cheated on his wife with a porn star three months after his son was born could derail any chance he had left to win the election.
Rodriguez began negotiating with the Enquirer, whose publisher, David Pecker, was a friend of Trump’s who had promised to buy and suppress negative stories about him during the campaign. But Pecker declined to pay Daniels.
Instead, the Enquirer’s editor, Dylan Howard, connected Cohen to a lawyer for Daniels. They negotiated a $130,000 nondisclosure agreement three days after the “Access Hollywood” tape emerged.
Cohen has said that Trump approved the deal. After a delay of several weeks, Cohen drew the money from his personal home equity line of credit and wired it to Daniels’ lawyer from a shell company he had set up. Both Cohen and Daniels signed the agreement. Trump did not.
Daniels remained silent, and Trump won the election. After he became president, Trump and his company reimbursed Cohen for the hush money and falsely recorded those payments as legal fees.
