“This is about the extent that Mr. Cohen and the president have gone to intimidate this woman, to silence her, to threaten her, and to put her under their thumb. It is thuggish behavior from people in power. And it has no place in American democracy.” —Michael Avenatti, attorneyIn a long-awaited interview on CBS‘s “60 Minutes” on Sunday night, adult film star Stormy Daniels detailed a brief sexual relationship she says she had with President Donald Trump and potentially-illegal efforts and threats made by Trump and his associates to keep her quiet about the affair.
Five years after Daniels’s single sexual encounter with Trump in 2006, she was offered $15,000 to tell her story to In Touch magazine. The story never ran because Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, threatened legal action against the publication—and weeks later, Daniels was threatened with physical harm by someone she had never met.
“I was in a parking lot, going to a fitness class with my infant daughter,” she told Anderson Cooper. “And a guy walked up on me and said to me, ‘Leave Trump alone. Forget the story.’ And then he leaned around and looked at my daughter and said, ‘That’s a beautiful little girl. It’d be a shame if something happened to her mom.’ And then he was gone.”
The encounter left Daniels shaken. She said it caused her to deny that the affair took place when a gossip website published a story about it later that year, and when various outlets offered her money to go public when Trump announced his run for president, she refused.
Daniels said she was later relieved to be offered $130,000 by Trump’s lawyer in October 2016, just before the presidential election, in order to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) promising to keep quiet about the story.
“I turned down a large payday multiple times…I didn’t wanna take away from the legitimate and legal, I’d like to point out, career that I’ve worked very hard to establish. I did not want my family and my child exposed to all the things that she’s being exposed to right now,” she said.
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