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Stormy Daniels, born Stephanie Gregory, is unsure of the first time she stood up to a bully. But in reflecting on the question, she brings up an incident that happened when she was around 17 or 18, and she stumbled upon some kids throwing fireworks at a bony, famished horse. Later that night, Stormy and her boyfriend broke through a fence, unchained the horse, and got the animal out of there.
Her determination to rescue the abused horse may speak to her character, but when discussing her childhood, Stormy describes a young girl forced to forge her independence by combatting those who had pushed her too far — a pattern that would lead to her staring down the President of the United States and his closest allies decades later.
As a child growing up on the outskirts of Baton Rouge (as she jokes in a Southern accent, “I was born a poor white girl on the base of the bayou”), Stormy remembers thinking her mom, Sheila, was beautiful — a four-foot-eleven Julianne Moore look-alike. She recalls frequent trips to Kmart, where she’d beg Sheila for a quarter to ride the miniature merry-go-round.
Her father William abandoned the family when Stormy was four, around the time her maternal grandmother died. (He did not return Penthouse’s requests for comment, though he told Inside Edition he paid child support, and years later bought his daughter a car, which Stormy confirms.)
“I had no family now,” Sheila tells me in a phone call. “[Stormy] came out of my body when nobody wanted her.” William’s absence changed Sheila. Prior to his departure, she says she believed the world was kind. “I was sheltered,” she explains. “I didn’t know how bad the world could be.”
As for Stormy, she learned about hardship at an early age. She speaks of going hungry at home while her mom went missing for days, leaving her without food. She describes episodes of panic in her bedroom, where her mother had hung a Mickey Mouse blanket over the window because they couldn’t afford blinds. Working two jobs to support Stormy, Sheila insists she always left her daughter with neighbors and babysitters. And as she tells it, the blanket over the window was part of the room’s Mickey Mouse theme.
One of the few facts Stormy and Sheila agree on is that Sheila would chain-smoke, lighting one cigarette with another. “Damn right I smoked,” Sheila declares. Stormy remembers her mother’s ashtrays all over the house. She and a childhood friend also recall rooms cluttered with trash. “Oh my, Sheila!” the friend recently wrote on Stormy’s personal Facebook page. “The thought of your mom’s kitchen will raise me from my bed to clean mine to this day.”
Sheila, says Stormy, would only pay attention to her when she was sick. And she describes her mother’s taste in men as “the worst.” Both mother and daughter recall a night when Sheila was arguing with a lover and a shotgun blast pierced Sheila’s bedroom wall and flew into Stormy’s room. “It was buckshot, so it exploded in my closet and blew holes through all my clothes,” Stormy says. Sheila downplays what happened, saying it was an accident and that she replaced Stormy’s clothes.
“She also got kicked out of places where I was dancing — multiple times for getting drunk and taking off her top.”
When Stormy was ten, her stepfather gave her money to buy Christmas presents. She bought a horse instead, and named her Perfect Jade — Stormy’s one healthy escape. After school, she worked at stables to help feed Perfect Jade.
Stormy remembers her school days were as difficult as her home life. “Some girls were really snotty and mean,” she says, adding that she felt like “an outcast.” She recalls moments when girls tried to bum cigarettes off her because her clothes reeked from her mom’s smoking. Years later, when Stormy began writing pornographic movies, she named the female characters who got murdered after her middle school and high school bullies. She estimates it took four or five movies to kill them all off.
In high school, Stormy continued to work at horse stables. She realized she preferred horses to humans and began volunteering at a veterinary’s office.
By the end of high school, Stormy was dating a guy she says showed her his porn magazines. She ripped out a Suze Randall photo of Penthouse Pet Janine Lindemulder posing in riding clothes next to a horse trailer. Oh my God! she thought. This is a trifecta! Stormy says she was into porn as much as any teenage boy, but only as something to look at, not as a future life path.
During her senior year, Stormy applied to college. She and her mother both recall a Texas veterinary school offering her a scholarship — one that did not cover living expenses. Stormy couldn’t afford to move to Texas. Not long after, she moved out.
While crashing at a friend’s house, Stormy began working as a stripper, both to support herself while still in school and to start saving for college. Then she remembers a third reason: “You know what it was really about? Not wanting to sell my horse.”
Stormy and her boyfriend eventually moved into their own house. After two years away from her mother, she agreed to let Sheila move in, with disastrous results. “She did nothing but undermine me,” Stormy says. “Smoking inside, driving my boyfriend’s car without permission… She also got kicked out of places where I was dancing — multiple times for getting drunk and taking off her top.” Eventually Stormy had to tell her mom to leave. “When I kicked her out,” she recalls, “she stole my furniture.”
Sheila tells a different story, claiming Stormy moved to California and left her mother and furniture behind. “I did not steal,” she says, adding she plans to sue Stormy for defamation. “If you talk to that witch again,” Sheila continues, “I have an earful for her.”
Two days later, Sheila decides to call her daughter. The phone rings as Stormy is lounging in Munyan’s living room. “This should be good!” Stormy says. She lets the call go to voicemail. A few minutes later, she sits back on a white leather couch and plays the message on speakerphone. “Brace yourselves, ladies and gentlemen.”
We hear Sheila’s emotional, high-pitched voice coming out of the phone: “I just want to let you know that your shenanigans have cost your father his job… Enjoy your life because what goes around comes around! And if Glen had any smarts he would take that child and go somewhere else. ’Cause you’re an unfit mother!”
“Says the unfit mother!” Stormy interjects.
The message goes on. When it ends, Stormy recounts something her husband said of his estranged mother-in-law. After seeing the movie I, Tonya, Crain told Stormy that Tonya Harding’s mom, LaVona, reminded him of Sheila. “We should put them in an RV and film them driving across country!” Stormy quips. “LaVona and Sheila Do America! Can you imagine? I’d invest in that. We’d all be rich.”
Stormy pauses. For the first time, her face reveals an emotion — worry — she didn’t show even while discussing her mortal enemy, Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen. Looking at me with those searching blue eyes, she says, “Please don’t write a whole article about my mother.”
Two weeks later I speak to Sheila one last time. She is unapologetic. “I am what I am and I loved Stormy,” she tells me. Then her voice chokes up. “You bet my ass I miss my baby… She’s all I had. She will always be a part of me. That’s my blood in her.”
