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It was while her star was rising that Stormy Daniels met Donald Trump.
On July 13, 2006, Stormy was promoting Wicked at a booth at the American Century Celebrity Golf Championship in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, when Trump allegedly approached her. Moments earlier he had announced his intention by hollering, “I want to meet her!” — a detail supplied by adult performer Alana Evans, who heard this from Stormy herself, as Evans told me in a March interview.
Later that day, Evans, who was on vacation in Tahoe, went with a friend to a resort tattoo parlor. When she spotted Stormy passing by, she hailed her porn colleague and the two talked. That’s when she says Stormy told her that Trump had invited her to a party.
Daniels meeting Trump was not especially unusual. At the time, she was a porn star and he was a reality-TV star, not a politician. And as Evans points out, Trump would have found Stormy appealing. “He has a type: strong, beautiful,” says Evans. “Stormy looks like [Trump’s ex-wife] Marla Maples.”
That evening, Stormy called her multiple times, according to Evans. By the fifth call, she remembers hearing a voice she identifies as Trump’s calling out: “C’mon, Alana! Let’s party! Let’s have some fun!” Evans considered the offer, but declined. “I make it a practice to stay away from men who are powerful,” she explains. “Anything can happen to a girl like me.”
(When asked to comment on these details, the White House directed Penthouse to Trump’s personal attorneys, Charles Harder and Michael Cohen, who did not respond to repeated requests. Cohen’s own lawyer, David Schwartz, wrote in a text message, “I have no answers to any of your questions.”)
Stormy herself wishes she had never taken the elevator to the penthouse suite of Harrah’s Lake Tahoe Hotel and Casino. And she is sick of being asked about what happened. As she saunters into Munyan’s dining room wearing lightning bolt earrings, she apologizes for her hoarse voice. “I’ve done nothing but talk,” she says.
Taking a seat at the table, she begins dining on pasta with red sauce, and sipping from a goblet of pinot noir. There’s a brownie on hand for dessert. “I have a food fear,” Stormy says to me. “I can’t stand to be hungry. If my stomach growls, I panic.”
Stormy would rather talk about her laundry basket.
In February, TMZ posted a photo of her on a leather couch beside a plastic laundry basket, signing covers of In Touch magazine. “STORMY DANIELS BRINGS HER DIRTY LAUNDRY… To Strip Club!!!” blared the headline. In actuality, she was using the $3.99 basket, just bought at Walmart, to carry her clothes, candles, lotions, and photos and DVDs to sell at her strip club appearances. Amused at the “fake news” story, Stormy named her basket “Fillecia” and created the Instagram account @stormysbasket, posting shots of the basket with a dog in it, and being interviewed by CNN reporters.
“I wouldn’t talk to them unless they interviewed the basket,” Stormy says. “And they did it!” Sitting at Munyan’s table and cackling merrily, she checks comments left on the Fillecia account. “Stop the presses!” she says, putting her hands in the air. “The basket got her first death threat!”
It seems time to bring up a subject bigger than the basket. I’d danced around Trump’s name for nearly an hour, uneasy about broaching it given Stormy’s feelings about journalists, but here I was beside the woman with the golden vagina that could topple the presidency. I had to go there.
“What was your impression of Trump before you met him?” I ask.
“Before I met him, I thought that he was on TV and had funny hair.”
“What was your impression when you met?”
“That he was on TV and had funny hair.”
Stormy told Anderson Cooper during her 60 Minutes appearance that while together in Trump’s 18th-floor room, the future 45th president said, “‘Have you seen my new magazine?’” Trump was referring to a recent issue of Forbes featuring him on the cover.
“I was like, ‘Does this normally work for you?’” she said to Cooper while detailing the experience. Stormy had essentially executed what The Game author and former pickup artist Neil Strauss calls a “neg” — an “ambiguous statement or seemingly accidental insult” apparently suggesting a lack of interest, which sometimes gets the other person interested. But unlike a PUA, Stormy didn’t intentionally neg him. What some men might study The Game to learn, she knew instinctively.
“Here was a man who’d cheated on his first wife… then allegedly called tabloids posing as a publicist to spread news about his sexual exploits.”
“I don’t think anyone’s ever spoken to him like that,” Stormy told Cooper. “I said… ‘Give me that,’ and I just remember him going, ‘You wouldn’t.’ ‘Hand it over.’” According to what Stormy said on 60 Minutes, she ordered the future president to drop his drawers and then spanked his bum.
During dinner in Trump’s hotel room, Stormy believes she bonded with him as a person. She recalls Trump being “fascinated with the business side” of porn. And she adds, “If someone is asking you questions, you can ask them whatever you want, so I could ask him questions.” She quizzed him about his business, including a pending publicity stunt where either he or WWE CEO Vince McMahon would shave the other’s hair at an upcoming WrestleMania. (Trump shaved McMahon’s hair at WrestleMania 23.) Trump, Stormy says, explained that his hair was “his brand,” so there’d be no televised pruning for him.
She describes meeting a version of Trump rarely seen on television. He was still a TV star with funny hair, but Stormy remembers him being interested in having a serious conversation about the dynamics of the Trump media persona that fueled his businesses.
“He seemed more human and multi-dimensional,” she recalls. They began discussing what Trump called “gimmicks,” and their discussion ranged into politics. “[Porn star] Mary Carey ran for governor [of California in 2003] and we talked about that,” Stormy says. In other words, a celebrity of some sort running for office could be as good a gimmick as a strange hairdo.
“Does his hair stay still as he has sex?” I ask.
“No, [his hair is] real,” Stormy replies. “He chose that.”
“And it just fluffs around as he’s on top of you?”
“Yeah, that’s real. Kind of like a drunken cockatoo.”
“Was it good sex?”
“What do you think?”
“Everyone’s different.”
Stormy sips her wine and side-eyes me.
“And the penis wasn’t big?” I continue.
“Yeah,” Stormy confirms.
“Like his fingers?” I joke.
Stormy puts her hands in the air. “I don’t want to shame anybody,” she explains.
Trump was not a problem to her, and she says she never intended to discuss the alleged one-night stand after she signed the nondisclosure agreement shortly before the 2016 election.
When the Wall Street Journal reported on the NDA on January 12, 2018, Stormy locked her New Jersey hotel room door as the press descended. She holed up alone for two days, with a friend delivering Chinese food at one point. Later, on January 27, the media hounded her at the 35th AVN Awards, so she hid again, this time in her room at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino’s high-rise tower overlooking Las Vegas. The security guards, who had nicknamed her “Rapunzel,” escorted her from her room to the event.
As Stormy posed on the red carpet in a blue sequined gown, she dodged questions about Trump. After all, she thought, was their encounter really such a stunning revelation? Here was a man who’d cheated on his first wife, Ivana, with Marla Maples, then allegedly called tabloids posing as a publicist to spread news about his sexual exploits. Trump’s fans knew who they’d voted for. Trump allegedly banging a porn star years ago seemed to her like no big deal. Surely, Trump’s team would stay silent, and as long as both parties never spoke out, the story would die.
Her vow of silence was not shared. On February 13, Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, announced that he’d paid Stormy with his own money. “Just because something isn’t true doesn’t mean that it can’t cause you harm or damage,” Cohen said, which Stormy interpreted as an insinuation that she was a liar.
Hold up, motherfucker, Stormy says she thought. I’m not allowed to open my mouth? And you can just open your mouth and lie and call me names? Enough is enough, and fuck you. I’m going to fight back.
Stormy has since filed a defamation suit against Cohen, and also sued to get out of her NDA. If Stormy wins her case, she plans to donate the $130K to Planned Parenthood in Cohen’s and Trump’s names. “Cause I’m that kind of cunt,” she says. “I don’t have shame. You can’t bully me.”
