Stormy Daniels owes Donald Trump about $670,000. This haunts her, especially now that Trump is trying to collect. One of Trump’s lawyers just demanded that Daniels sit for a deposition about her finances and complete a form listing her assets, including those of her husband and her 13-year-old daughter. “I am not handing over any of this information or filling out these forms,” Daniels said in a message to her lawyer that she shared with me in January. “I am fully prepared to go to jail before doing this. I would rather die than put my child’s name on a single thing for Trump.”
In a way, it’s a similar dilemma to the one Trump himself faces as he struggles to raise cash for the bonds to appeal the $450-million-plus judgment against him from New York State and the $80-million-plus judgment to the journalist and writer E. Jean Carroll. Neither, so far, appears to be making much progress. Last month, Daniels’s lawyer, Clark Brewster, persuaded her to complete the form, but outright defiance on her part seems still to be a possibility.
Musing about a possible arrest for failure to comply, Daniels texted me, “I’ll wear a dominatrix outfit to court. It’ll make for a festive mugshot.”
Ordinarily, Daniels’s debt—which represents just one small branch on the great oak of Trump scandals—might be of modest importance; it’s an offshoot of civil litigation, not a criminal case. But it now appears that of the four criminal indictments that Trump is facing, the only one likely to go to trial before the election is the case brought by Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney—which is known, informally, as “the Stormy Daniels case.”
The charges against Trump are based on the $130,000 that he paid Daniels, a porn actress, on the eve of the 2016 election; in return for the money, Daniels agreed not to disclose her claim that she had a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006. (Trump has long denied that they had sex.) Trump is charged with lying to the New York State authorities by asserting that the payment to Daniels was really a legal fee to his attorney Michael Cohen.
When Trump, the likely Republican nominee for president, faces the voters in November, he either will or will not be a convicted felon based in significant part on Daniels’s testimony. Her debt to Trump—and her refusal to pay it—complicates her usefulness as a witness, because the defense will surely argue that her anger about the debt gives her a motive to lie about the former president. So, as it happens, the story of Daniels’s debt—how it came about and what it means today—may be of considerable importance. In fact, the outcome of the presidential election and the future of American democracy may turn on it.
Trump is charged with lying to the New York State authorities by asserting that the payment to Daniels was really a legal fee to his attorney, Michael Cohen.
Daniels’s memoir, Full Disclosure, is written in her usual tone of jaunty confidence, but the story itself, stripped to its essentials, is grim. Born 44 years ago and raised in Baton Rouge, Stephanie Clifford grew up in squalor. “My dad left and my mom never cleaned the house or even did the dishes again. It was so gross.... Rats moved in and their poop was all over the house.” From the ages of 9 to 11, Stephanie was sexually assaulted by a neighbor who was in his 40s. Still, she received straight A’s and became the editor of her high-school newspaper.
When Stephanie was 17, she joined some friends on a visit to a local strip club. On a lark, she volunteered to do a couple of dances herself and made $85 in nine minutes, which she used to support her love of horseback riding. Still in high school, Stephanie started taking regular shifts at the club, then moved on to bigger clubs, purchased breast implants, and took on the name Stormy Daniels, which everyone (except the I.R.S.) now calls her.
It wasn’t a big leap from stripping to the porn business, which was thriving in the days of VHS cassettes. In 2004, at 25, she won an A.V.N. award—the porn Oscar—for best new starlet. She also married the second of her four husbands, who have all worked in porn. Daniels managed to avoid the drugs and drink that doomed so many in her industry, and she became not just a star, with a place in the A.V.N. Hall of Fame in 2014, but an entrepreneur in the field. She started to write and direct as well as appear in porn features, and she even auditioned for mainstream films now and then, winning small roles in the hit comedies Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin.
Meeting the Star of The Apprentice
The ambition to better herself led to the encounter that changed her life. On July 13, 2006, the porn-production company Wicked Pictures sponsored a hole at a celebrity golf tournament at Lake Tahoe, in Nevada. Daniels and two other actresses were stationed at one of the tees, to greet the golfers as they arrived. According to Daniels’s account, Donald Trump chatted her up, and she boasted that she was a director as well as an actress. After the round, Keith Schiller, Trump’s bodyguard, found Daniels and invited her to dinner in Trump’s hotel suite.
“What’s funny is that sex never once entered my mind,” Daniels later wrote. “Call me naïve, but he was one of the few straight guys—hell, any guy—who didn’t immediately stare at my tits.” In the suite, Daniels took the opportunity to pitch herself as a contestant on The Celebrity Apprentice. According to Daniels, Trump humored her, then removed his clothes when she went to the bathroom, and they had sex, briefly. There was no dinner. Trump called her a few times after that—and Daniels always asked about the Celebrity Apprentice gig—but neither the job nor another tryst materialized.
Daniels’s career continued, including a brief, semi-serious run for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in her native Louisiana in 2010. The following year, the gossip site TheDirty.com and Life & Style magazine ran items about the sexual encounter between Trump and Daniels. They were taken down after Michael Cohen denied them, and the story faded. Still, rumors about the encounter lingered, and Trump’s presidential candidacy—and especially the leak of the Access Hollywood “grab them by the pussy” tape on October 7, 2016—renewed interest in his sexual history.
Trump humored her, then removed his clothes when she went to the bathroom, and they had sex, briefly. There was no dinner.
Daniels was approached by a lawyer named Keith Davidson, who had earlier represented Karen McDougal when she made a catch-and-kill deal with American Media Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer; in return for $150,000, McDougal agreed not to disclose a months-long sexual relationship with Trump. (Trump has also denied having sex with McDougal.) Davidson told Daniels that she could make some money by offering Trump the chance to bury the story of their encounter in 2006. In a flurry of negotiations shortly before Election Day, Davidson and Cohen agreed that Trump would buy Daniels’s signature on a non-disclosure agreement for $130,000, which was wired on October 27. After Davidson and a colleague took their cuts, Daniels cleared about $80,000.
Trump won the presidency. The story stayed buried for two years, until The Wall Street Journal disclosed the payment to Daniels. Suddenly, Daniels needed a lawyer, and a friend recommended Michael Avenatti. He charged her just $100 as an up-front fee, but their agreement said he could raise money from the public for her legal defense.
Avenatti’s Rise and Fall
It’s difficult to overstate the amount of attention that Avenatti received after he began representing Daniels in early 2018. He was a ubiquitous presence on cable news, with 108 CNN and MSNBC appearances between March 7 and May 10, 2018. It was a low moment for Trump adversaries, and Avenatti became a resistance hero. During this period, I sometimes walked with him through Midtown Manhattan and people would stop him on every block to thank and praise him.
In a consummate act of hubris, Avenatti announced he was considering seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020. In the meantime, he also filed a pair of lawsuits on Daniels’s behalf. In one, he sued Trump to invalidate the non-disclosure agreement; Avenatti and Daniels won that case, and the judge ordered Trump to pay $44,000 in Daniels’s attorney fees.
The other lawsuit related to an incident that Daniels said took place after the first stories about her and Trump ran in 2011. Daniels said she had been approached by a man in a Las Vegas parking lot who said, “Leave Trump alone. Forget the story.” He then threatened her daughter. In 2018, after Avenatti recounted the story during his media rounds, Trump replied in a tweet that their account of the threat was “a total con job, playing the Fake News Media for fools (but they know it)!”
So, in the second lawsuit, Avenatti charged on Daniels’s behalf that Trump’s tweet defamed her. Even at the time, the case seemed bogus. Trump was simply denying an accusation against him, and his tweet had no discernible effect on Daniels’s reputation. Predictably, on October 15, 2018, federal judge S. James Otero dismissed the case, stating, “If this Court were to prevent Mr. Trump from engaging in this type of ‘rhetorical hyperbole’ against a political adversary, it would significantly hamper the office of the President. Any strongly-worded response by a president to another politician or public figure could constitute an action for defamation.”
In a consummate act of hubris, Avenatti announced he was considering seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.
The case was so weak that Otero ruled that Daniels had to pay Trump’s attorney fees, which were eventually calculated to be about $293,000. A failed appeal by Daniels (who was by then represented by a different lawyer) to the Ninth Circuit added $121,000 in fees to her debt to Trump. With interest and court fees the number now stands at around $670,000.
But Avenatti wasn’t finished. Also in 2018, Avenatti and Luke Janklow, a literary agent, negotiated an $800,000 advance with St. Martin’s Press for Daniels’s memoir, Full Disclosure. The first tranche of $250,000 went through to Daniels in the normal course of business, but Avenatti then forged Daniels’s signature on a letter to Janklow instructing him to send all further payments to an account that Avenatti controlled. Two payments of $148,750 each went to Avenatti, while he instructed Janklow to ignore Daniels’s demands for the money.
Eventually, Avenatti forwarded one of those payments to Daniels, but he used the other to cover his own expenses, including the lease on his Ferrari. (At his trial, Avenatti claimed that his agreement with Daniels entitled him to her book proceeds as compensation for his work on her behalf. But the agreement spoke only of his opportunity to raise outside funds for her defense, and it certainly said nothing about his right to forge her signature.)
“It’s bad enough that Avenatti stole from me,” Daniels said. “But he never even told me that he was bringing that stupid case against Trump. I learned about that case when I saw it on the news. And now it’s ruined my life.”
Gay-Dating Reality Show
For Michael Avenatti, this is what passes for good news these days: in 18 months or so, he may be transferred to a federal prison camp, where the inmates sleep in dormitories and the perimeter is unfenced.
In the meantime, his home is a federal prison with the haunting name Terminal Island. It’s a forbidding complex, surrounded by barbed wire, for a thousand inmates mostly housed in cells, on an unlovely spit of land south of Los Angeles. When I arrived for a visit with Avenatti on a recent Sunday morning, the guard at the gate told me that because of an “incident” the previous night, the prison was on lockdown, and all visits were canceled for the foreseeable future. Avenatti and I spoke by phone instead.
Few public figures—few people—have ever experienced a comeuppance like Avenatti did. In the handful of years since he weighed a run for the White House, he has been convicted in three separate federal criminal trials. The first involved a scheme to extort $25 million from Nike; the second was the theft from Daniels; and the third concerned Avenatti’s embezzlement of millions of dollars of damage awards to his law clients in California. He was sentenced to a total of 19 years in prison, which means, under federal rules, that his earliest possible release date is 2035, when he will be 64 years old.
Avenatti takes a measure of responsibility for his actions. “There’s no question I made mistakes and had to pay a price,” he told me. But he feels the multiple prosecutions were excessive, as was his sentence. “The person who has gotten fucked more than anyone else is Michael Avenatti,” he said. “Anybody who thinks what happened to me is normal or acceptable is either biased or a complete moron.” He denies Daniels’s claim that he filed the defamation case against Trump without first telling her. (Under the principles of legal ethics, Avenatti was obliged to give Daniels advance notice of the case, but she was not required to sign the initial court papers. In any event, since Daniels was not trained as a lawyer, she had no way of knowing that the case against Trump was a loser.)
While Avenatti has become a convicted felon, Daniels has continued, in her scrappy way, to find ways to make a living. Moving through her fourth decade, Daniels is relying less on her body and breasts—Thunder and Lightning, as she calls the latter—as her principal assets. She hasn’t done much stripping since her “Make America Horny Again” national tour in 2018.
Last year, she wrote, directed, and starred in Redemption, a two-hour-and-43-minute epic, featuring a traditional Western plot and a few explicit sex scenes. (Her only sex scenes were with her husband, who was also the cinematographer.) Daniels has a podcast, Beyond the Norm. She’s indulged an interest in the paranormal, appearing on podcasts and streaming shows about ghost hunting. (Her own program on the subject, Spooky Babes, hasn’t yet been distributed.)
Daniels now lives in central Florida, but last month, in Bakersfield, California, she taped her third season as the host of a gay-dating reality show that is broadcast on the OutTV streaming service, which is aimed at the L.G.B.T.Q.+ market. For the Love of DILFs—that is, Daddies I’d Like to Fuck—puts a group of handsome younger men known as himbos together with a group of the older daddies in a mansion and sees if romance blossoms.
Daniels, who identifies as bisexual, has become something of a gay icon in recent years. “Lots of gay men come to my dance shows,” she said. “They want me to know that they’re rooting for me.” In all, though, Daniels said that even if she were inclined to pay her debt toTrump, she doesn’t have the money.
When Trump’s trial begins later this month, a crucial question will likely be whether the jury will believe Daniels’s testimony about her tryst with Trump and the negotiations for the $130,000 hush-money payment. Avenatti is skeptical. “She has zero credibility, and she is the most opportunistic person I’ve ever met,” he told me. In 2022, during the criminal trial in New York, where Avenatti was charged with stealing from Daniels, he represented himself and cross-examined her. In a preview of what Trump’s lawyers may do, Avenatti mocked her interest in the paranormal.
“You have also claimed that you have the ability to see and speak to dead people, haven’t you?,” Avenatti asked.
“Yes, I have said that,” Daniels replied.
“And you have also claimed that you have the ability to speak with a haunted doll named Susan, who you speak to and she speaks back to you, isn’t that true?”
“Susan speaks to everyone on the show,” Daniels said. “She is a character on Spooky Babes.”
“Isn’t it true, Ms. Daniels, that you have claimed that you have the ability to speak to the doll, and that she speaks back to you, yes or no?”
“Yes. She even has her own Instagram.”
The jury believed Daniels, and Avenatti was convicted on all counts.
Recalling her testimony, Daniels told me, “The prosecutors just wanted me to answer every question with a yes or no, but whenever I went off on a tangent, I saw the jury nodding and agreeing. Regular people don’t want to hear lawyer-speak.”
The Manhattan prosecutors have the option of not calling Daniels as a witness. If they can establish that Trump lied to the government about whether his reimbursements to Cohen were legal fees, it doesn’t matter whether the 2006 tryst took place or not. But paring down the case that way has risks. A trial featuring just Cohen and the documents may lead the jury to wonder what the fuss was about. (And Cohen, who pleaded guilty to a variety of federal charges in 2018, is also a problematic witness.) Daniels’s testimony would give the jury a full picture of the true political stakes of the case.
At the moment, it appears that prosecutors do plan to call Daniels, because they have already subjected her to several grueling prep sessions, which have included brutal mock cross-examinations. “They treated it like a sex crime,” Daniels told me. “They went into unbelievable detail. ‘How was his skin?’ ‘How was his tongue?’ I’m a porn star. I’ve talked about sex before. But this made me sick.”
Why E. Jean Carroll and Not Me?
So, if Daniels is summoned, she will testify at Trump’s criminal trial, but her thoughts have turned lately to a different case in New York City—that of E. Jean Carroll. Carroll claimed that Trump sexually assaulted her in a department-store dressing room in the mid-1990s; when Trump denied it and demeaned her, Carroll sued for defamation and won a jury verdict of more than $80 million. “I have nothing against her—I’m glad she won,” Daniels told me in a late-night phone call. “But I don’t get why she gets all that money, and I get nothing—worse than nothing. He denied sex with both of us. We both told the truth. But she gets rich, and I have to pay.” Obviously, there is a major difference between Carroll’s and Daniels’s encounters with Trump; Carroll said she was assaulted, and Daniels acknowledges a consensual encounter.
As for the debt to Trump, her lawyer, Brewster, has suggested that perhaps they could file another defamation case against Trump along the same lines as Carroll’s. But that case would be a long shot at this late date. She could also try to raise money with a GoFundMe or eliminate the debt by filing for bankruptcy. Even as Daniels approaches her high-profile standoff with Trump from the witness stand in Manhattan, she’s more weary than ever of lawyers and the legal system. “I’m better off without a lawyer,” Daniels told me. “What good have they ever done me? This is the first time I’ve thought with all my heart that I wished I never told the truth [about Trump] in the first place.”
Jeffrey Toobin, a legal analyst and journalist, is the author of many books, including Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism