Under attack from Team Trump, Stormy Daniels proves tenacious

Donald Trump’s defense attorney and Stormy Daniels went head-to-head on Thursday during the cross-examination of the porn star’s bloodthirsty testimony, with the questioning occasionally drifting into the bizarre and subsequently even being criticized by the judge.

In interviews that were often hostile, Daniels was quick on her feet and walked a fine line between stubbornness and vulnerability as jurors watched as the defense mocked her career and attacked her credibility.

She clapped back for hours during the most intense testimony yet in the criminal trial, which is about whether a $130,000 hush-money payment to Daniels was fraudulently covered up to influence the 2016 presidential election.

Trump lawyer Susan Necheles repeatedly insisted in her interviews that Daniels, 45, had made up her story of a one-time sexual encounter with Trump.

“You made this all up, didn’t you?” the lawyer asked at one point, prompting Daniels to respond with an emphatic “No.”

For a few moments, Daniels accused Necheles of putting words in her mouth: “You want me to say it’s changed, but it hasn’t changed,” she said, referring to her account of events .

Team Trump vied to portray Daniels as a greedy, sleazy and deceitful man.

Necheles asked Daniels about her decision to write a book depicting the encounter and her decision to promote branded products.

“No different than Mr. Trump,” Daniels quipped.

In one of the more unusual moments of the nearly eight hours of testimony, Necheles brought up an interest in tarot cards and the paranormal from Daniels, apparently in an attempt to portray her as crazy.

She then presented Daniels as a fabulist, mocking her work as a screenwriter and director of porn films while claiming that this made her good at distorting the truth.

“So you have a lot of experience making false stories about sex seem true?” Necheles said.

“Wow, that’s not how I would put it,” Daniels said.

“The sex is real. The characters’ names may be different. But the sex is very real. That’s why it’s pornography,” the witness continued.

If the Trump story wasn’t true, she said, “I would have written it much better.”

– Court case rejected again –

At the end of their marathon testimony, which lasted about eight hours over two days, the defense asked Daniels if she knew anything about Trump’s accounting – the real meat of the case.

She said she didn’t.

But that wasn’t the point of calling Daniels to the witness stand, a prosecutor later said – she was there to explain in detail why Trump wanted to cover up her story at the end of his bid for the White House.

That argument came up after jurors were dismissed for today, during a hearing in which Team Trump again tried to seek a mistrial.

It was denied again, but not before Judge Juan Merchan skewered Trump’s lawyers before his eyes.

“I don’t agree with your statement that there is a new report here. “I don’t agree with the statement that history is changing,” he said, audibly irritated.

In his extraordinary disparagement of the defense’s advocacy, Merchan said that their very insistence that Daniels staged the encounter paved the way for the prosecution to present evidence – much of it salacious – to the contrary.

Necheles spent much of her criticism dwelling on the very details they cited as grounds for a mistrial, Merchan said, and “drilled it into the jury’s ears over and over again.”

“I don’t understand why,” he said in his dramatic criticism, asking why the defense did not object to the presentation of these details during direct questioning.

And that Trump’s team attacked Daniels from the beginning, including during opening statements, “pitting your client’s word against Ms. Daniels’ word,” Merchan said.

“This, in my opinion, allows the people to do everything in their power to rehabilitate them and confirm their story,” he said, using a term for the prosecution.

“Your motion for a mistrial is denied.”

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