Stormy Daniels is ready to talk about Donald Trump. In an interview at her Florida home, Daniels discusses the Trump indictment, revisits her 2006 sexual encounter with the former president at a Nevada resort, and how “all hell broke loose' right after.
by the Manhattan District Attorney was unusually hot, as though the weather itself had caught the rising fever in American politics. “Normally, I’d say sit outside, but it’s, like, 90 degrees so we’d better stay in here,” says Stormy Daniels, taking a seat in the red-walled living room of the home she and her husband, Barrett Blade, moved into last year.
Daniels averts her gaze, staring out the glass door to the yard, where her new horse, Redemption, is munching fresh hay in his stall. She fusses with the frills on her navy sundress. Collects herself, and turns back. “Let’s talk about something else. I mean, we’re not here to chat about horses, are we?”
Stormy Daniels is at once central to Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg’s case against Donald Trump, and peripheral to it. The precise charges Bragg’s office is expected to bring against the former president—and current 2024 presidential candidate—are as yet unknown, but based on the witnesses called to appear before the grand jury, it’s almost certain that they stem from the $130,000 paid to Daniels in 2016.
What happened next in that hotel room is, in part, a blank. It’s also the oh-so-brief chapter of the Stormy Daniels/Donald Trump saga that Daniels has been mulling over since she did her first round of media appearances in 2018. Back then, she seemed happy to joke about Trump’s appendage—mushroom-like, in her estimation—and his average-ness as a lover, and to brush off any intimation that she’d been victimized, that she was another #MeToo case study.