Stormy Daniels recounts a sexual encounter with Trump in a hotel room while testifying in the hush money case

Adult film actress Stormy Daniels appeared as a witness in former President Donald Trump’s New York criminal trial on Tuesday, testifying under oath about the sexual encounter she allegedly had with Trump in 2006 and the $130,000 deal made for her Silence concluded in the final days of the 2016 presidential campaign.

Daniels described parts of the 2006 encounter in detail, saying at one point she thought she “blacked out” and that Trump didn’t use a condom. That prompted Trump lawyer Todd Blanche to “move for a mistrial” as both sides returned from their lunch break, saying Daniels’ testimony was “inappropriate and unduly prejudicial.”

“From our perspective, there is no way to ring the bell,” Blanche said during a dramatic argument with prosecutors.

Judge Juan Merchan was most opposed to the mistrial, but acknowledged that “there were things that would have been better left unsaid” and said he would strike some of her statements from the record.

Daniels was the second witness called Tuesday. She testified that she met Trump in July 2006 at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe. Daniels described their first meeting as a “very brief encounter” and testified that she was 27 and remembered that Trump was the same age as her father – about 60.

The jury, who appeared to be completely focused on Daniels and her testimony, were then shown a picture of the two together.

She said they later met at the club and a man who she later learned was Trump’s bodyguard told her Trump wanted to have dinner with her. She said she responded, “No, with a curse word before it.”

However, she was given the bodyguard’s number and said that later that day her publicist convinced her that she should accept the invitation, telling her, “This will be a great story.” He is a businessman. What could possibly go wrong?”

She said she went to Trump’s penthouse hotel suite and was told they were going to dinner at one of the restaurants downstairs. When she entered the room, which she said was “three times the size of my apartment,” he was wearing “silk or satin” pajamas. She said she joked, “Does Hugh Hefner know you stole his pajamas?” and asked him to change, which he did.

They then sat at a dining table in the suite, where Trump asked her numerous questions about her writing and directing adult films. He then asked her about sexually transmitted diseases and she said she gets tested all the time and “I’ve never had a bad test.”

She said she became frustrated with him because he kept interrupting her answers, and when he pulled out a magazine with him on the cover, she said, “Someone should spank you with that.” She said she got it then rolled up and “hit” him with it. While the jurors looked poker-faced as they testified, one of them began rubbing her face and appeared to be holding back laughter.

Afterward, she said Trump was “much more polite” and suggested she come on his TV show “The Apprentice.” “He said, ‘You remind me of my daughter,'” and her appearance on the show would show that she shouldn’t be underestimated.

In total, they talked for about two hours, Daniels said. She said she went to the bathroom and when she went out, Trump was lying on the bed “in his boxers and a T-shirt.” She said she was “scared, like a jump scare. I didn’t expect anyone to be there, especially without a lot of clothes.”

She said Trump told her, “I thought you were serious about what you wanted.” She said she sensed “there was certainly a power imbalance. He was bigger and blocked the way, but I wasn’t threatened verbally or physically.” When asked if she ended up having sex with him on the bed, she replied, “Yes.”

She described the sex as brief and said Trump told her, “It was great. ‘Let’s get back together, honey.'” She said he didn’t use a condom and didn’t express concerns that his wife would find out what happened . She said he also didn’t give her his phone number.

The next day, Trump’s bodyguard reached out to her and invited her to meet Trump at a bar at her hotel. When she got there, he was dating then-Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger. Trump left about 10 minutes later, but continued to call her after the encounter, “with an update – or a non-update if he didn’t have one – for Apprentice.”

“He always called me sweetheart,” she said.

She said they met again in January 2007 when he invited her to the launch of his Trump vodka brand. There, she said, he introduced her to his girlfriend “Karen,” who she later learned was Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model who said she had had a months-long affair with Trump during that time. Former National Enquirer editor David Pecker testified at the start of the trial that he paid her $150,000 to silence her about the claim during the 2016 election. Trump has denied both Daniels and McDougal’s claims.

Daniels said Trump also invited her to Trump Tower during the same period and assured her, “I’m still working on the Apprentice thing.”

She said they last saw each other in the summer of 2007, when he invited her to see him at a Los Angeles bungalow where he was staying. She said he “continued to try to make sexual advances” but she shot him down. “I told him I was on my period,” she said. He said he called her later and told her he hadn’t been able to get her on his show.

The focus of the case, the first criminal trial against a former president, is the payments that Trump’s then-lawyer Michael Cohen made to Daniels at the end of the 2016 presidential campaign. Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 in exchange for keeping quiet about her claims of a sexual encounter with Trump. Trump has denied the claim.

Daniels said her manager, Gina Rodriguez, spoke to her in 2015 about going public with her story for money after Trump announced he was running for president. The manager only had great success shopping the story after the October 2016 release of the so-called “Access Hollywood” tape, which featured Trump bragging in 2005 that he could grope women without their consent.

She said Rodriguez then told her that Trump and Cohen were “interested in paying for the story,” and she agreed because it meant the story – which his husband knew nothing about – would not become public. “I didn’t care about the amounts. It was just, ‘Get it done,'” she said.

Prosecutors say Trump paid Cohen back the money in payments mislabeled as legal fees and charged him with 34 counts of falsifying business records. He has pleaded not guilty.

Daniels’ deal with Cohen was revealed in a January 2018 Wall Street Journal article. When asked what impact the story has had on her life, Daniels said, “Chaos.” “My husband asks questions, my friends ask questions,” she said as people showed up on her front lawn.

She said Cohen had begun speaking publicly about her allegations, but she could not do so because of the nondisclosure agreement and the $1 million penalty it included if she violated it. She said she later hired attorney Michael Avenatti “so I could advocate for myself.”

He helped her leave the NDA, but also filed an unsuccessful defamation lawsuit against Trump on her behalf and against her will. Daniels lost the case and was ordered to pay Trump’s legal fees. She eventually fired Avenatti and he was convicted of several crimes, including stealing from Daniels.

Daniels had vowed on Twitter never to pay the legal fees, which she admitted under cross-examination totaled more than $660,000.

“You said, ‘I’m going to jail before I pay a dime?'” Trump lawyer Susan Necheles asked. “Right,” Daniels replied.

She also admitted to Necheles that she hates Trump and has called him mean names online, including calling him an “orange turd,” but said that Trump, who had repeatedly called her “horseface,” initially made fun of her .

Before Daniels took the stand for the first time, Merchan said Daniels could testify that they had sexual relations, but left out details. On the witness stand, Daniels often explained her allegations without being asked and was repeatedly asked by the judge to only answer the questions asked of her.

Trump, who Merchan fined for violating a gag order by repeatedly attacking Daniels and Cohen, used his social media platform in court to complain that he had “only recently been told who who is the witness today.”

“This is unprecedented, no time for lawyers to prepare. “No judge has ever conducted a trial in such a biased and biased manner,” he wrote in a post that was deleted a short time later.

Truth Social’s post was published shortly before the Associated Press first reported that Daniels was expected to testify on Tuesday. It’s unclear when Trump and his lawyers were told she would testify – prosecutors typically only told them the day before who would testify, citing Trump’s record of testimony.

That Daniels would testify, however, is no surprise. Trump’s legal team had unsuccessfully argued that she should be barred from testifying, a request the judge made before the trial began. Cohen is also expected to testify at some point.

Before Daniels, prosecutors called a longtime publishing executive to authenticate and read excerpts from some of Trump’s books.

Sally Franklin, an executive at Penguin Random House named Sally Franklin, read one from “Trump: Think Like a Billionaire” about how closely Trump keeps track of his money – something prosecutors are likely to use to to show that he knew exactly what he was paying Cohen back for.

“I always sign my checks so I know where my money is going,” he said in the excerpt.