Stormy Daniels: how a porn star from a poor town in Louisiana could be about to take down Donald Trump

There’s a sweet sort of irony, in a way, that the president with a reputation for groping women, insulting women and “grab[bing] ‘em by the p***” could have his entire career brought down by a porn star.

That (former) president is, of course, Donald Trump, and the porn star is Stormy Daniels, the proud former stripper famous for her ‘Make America Horny Again’ tour and the woman Trump reportedly paid “hush money” to in a bid to keep their 2006 affair out of the public eye before the then-presidential election (he has always denied that the affair took place).

Details of the alleged encounter have bubbled up several times over the 17 years since — when Daniels first revealed all to a magazine in 2011, when Trump ran for presidency in 2016, and when reports later suggested Trump had paid $130,000 to silence Daniels ahead of the election — but this week they’ve found themselves unfolding in their most graphic and public form yet, as Trump and Daniels begin their extraordinary face-off in a New York court.

“Do you worry about STDs?”, “let's get together again, honey bunch” and “you remind me of my daughter, she is smart and blonde and beautiful and people underestimate her as well” are among the shocking phrases Daniels accused the former 45th US President of saying to her during their awkward and unexpected 2006 “sexual encounter” when she testified during Trump’s hush-money trial yesterday, triggering laughter among the jury.

Trump, 77, has pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal a payment of $130,000 to Daniels to keep their affair quiet, calling it a "very big day, a very revealing day" as he left the courtroom last night. He told reporters the trial was going “very well” despite reports from inside the courtroom alleging that he was “cursing audibly” during Daniels’ graphic testimony.

The trial makes him the first former US president to face criminal charges after leaving office and commentators have warned that the outcome could destroy any re-election dreams for Trump, currently the Republican frontrunner in the race for the White House later this year.

He risks a four-year jail term if convicted — and while this is not legally a blocker to Trump standing for re-election (anyone convicted of a crime can run, even from prison) — it could certainly cause a PR nightmare, making it harder for him to campaign if he is barred from New York state or even behind bars. Trump and his team argue the opposite: they have long been claiming that the “deep state” is trying to stop him from standing for a second term in office and that the case is a politically-motivated witch hunt, so any arrest would play perfectly into their narrative.

Whatever the outcome for Trump, one thing’s for sure: this latest twist in Trump’s rollercoaster tale throws Daniels, 45 — once a stripper in an impoverished southern state town — straight back into the centre of one of American politics’ most salacious firestorms. Commentators already calling her “one of the most powerful people in politics” and a “true American hero” for not only potentially bringing about Trump’s potential arrest, but for managing to humiliate him at the same time.

“Giving him a ride straight to jail,” she captioned a meme doing the rounds of Trump riding her like a horse last year. “He probably watches my movies on repeat which may be why he has so many typos. (Slippery fingers from lube and KFC),” she wrote in another tweet, referring to Trump as “tiny”, the longtime nickname she knows he’ll despise. Almost two decades since “the worst 90 seconds of [her] life” in that hotel room back in 2006, Trump critics say they are delighted to see Daniels finally getting the last laugh.

So how did Daniels get here and what were the events that put her at the centre of the US politics’ Venn? Here’s everything you need to know about the woman who could be about to take down Trump.

Horse riding at her home in Louisiana. A passion for writing, the heavy metal band Mötley Crüe and a teenage crush on Patrick Swayze. Aspirations to become a journalist or even a vet.

In many ways, the details of Daniels’ childhood paint a picture of a typical all-American upbringing. “I wasn’t like the popular girl, and I wasn’t the jock, and I wasn’t the ditz,” she once said of her status at school. “I don’t know. I was just sort of in the middle of the road.”

But Daniels’ darker revelations about her past offer an explanation as to why she has since been keen to shed her birth name, Stephanie Clifford. She grew up in a Baton Rouge, an impoverished neighbourhood of Louisiana, and her memoir Full Disclosure describes how “there [were] days without electricity”. Her parents, Sheila and Bill Gregory, divorced when she was just three or four years old, her father having little to do with her while she was growing up and her mother working as a trucking company manager to pay for Daniels’ dance and horse-riding lessons.

Daniels’ book tells an upsetting story of neglect and abuse, including her alleged sexual abuse by a middle-aged man when she was just nine years old. “The deck has always been stacked against me,” she wrote, but: “I own my story and the choices I made.”

Even back then, Daniels clearly had much of the fiery strength of character she boasts today. “We will all get along just fine as soon as you realize that I am queen,” she wrote in her yearbook entry at Scotlandville Magnet High School in 1997. She got good grades, and considered a career in veterinary work or journalism, but it was a chance visit to a strip club to see a friend at the age of 17 that was to form the foundations of an unlikely and lifelong career.

Her stripping career began with a guest performance but quickly led to regular gigs. She proved herself to be a natural show-woman, choosing the stage name Stormy Daniels in a nod to her favourite rock band Motley Crue, whose bassist named his daughter Storm. “She was moving in a direction that was bigger than us,” her former colleague from the strip club, Chuck Rolling, once said. “We’re in Baton Rouge. We’re not even New Orleans.”

By the age of 23, Daniels had bought herself a house and a car with her earnings, though she reportedly feared running out of money by middle age if she did not find a sustainable source of income. She soon moved into pornography, producing, directing and acting in X-rated films and winning awards for them. She even landed roles in mainstream movies like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and in reality TV shows — which is where she and Trump first crossed paths.

When Trump and Daniels first met, they had several things in common: a reality TV background, a knack for self-promotion and a ferocious determination to get to the top. “She is not someone to be underestimated,” Hollywood director Judd Apatow once said. “She was a very serious businesswoman and a filmmaker and had taken the reins of her career.”

According to Daniels, the affair with Trump took place in 2006, when he was a mere property developer and star on The Apprentice and was already married to Melania Trump (Melania had recently given birth to their son). Daniels and Trump reportedly met at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. They talked about the TV business, had sex in Trump’s hotel penthouse and went their separate ways. She says Trump called her “honeybunch” and has since described his penis has “smaller than average” with “a huge mushroom head. Like a toadstool....” She says she remembers thinking to herself during sex: “Please don’t try to pay me... But I bet if he did, it would be a lot”.

Little did Daniels know then what a life (and politics)-altering encounter it was to be. Five years later, in 2011, she gave a tell-all interview to Touch magazine describing an affair, but the characters in the story were not considered particularly newsworthy and the story largely gathered dust.

All of this changed when Trump ran for presidency a few years later. During his campaign, 19 women came forward alleging he had done everything from groping them to suggesting they lie down on the bed with him to “watch some telly-telly”. He denied all the allegations but was then caught on tape telling a TV host that he forced himself on women because he could as a rich and famous man.

Trump’s legal team quickly began attempts to silence any individuals who might reveal further details about their candidates’ past — including Daniels. A month before the election, in October 2016, Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen approached the porn star and offered her $130,000 and had her sign a nondisclosure agreement to stay quiet. He is also reported to have offered Playboy model Karen McDougal $150,000 for a similar deal.

Cohen has since claimed he paid Daniels with his own money and was never reimbursed by Trump or his company, but reports quickly started to emerge about other individuals being paid to keep quiet.

None of this seemed to put voters off. Roughly 40 per cent of all women and 52 per cent of white women went on to vote for Trump and he was elected as president the following month, in November 2016. It wasn’t until 2018 — almost 18 months into his presidency — that further details emerged and the mood started to change.

Daniels filed a lawsuit against Trump, claiming that the NDA she’d signed was invalid because Trump had never personally signed it. FBI agents raided Cohen’s office and seized documents relating to the matter, and Cohen was charged in 2018. He pleaded guilty to breaking the law in paying Daniels, served prison time and was disbarred. Trump was never charged and denied the affair, his lawyer accusing Daniels of extortion.

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office opened an investigation, but it was only five years later — in April 2023 — that there was any sign of an update.

While all of his was going on in the 2000s and 2010s, Daniels was leading a tempestuous love life. In 2007, the year after her affair with Trump, she married fellow porn performer Michael Mosny — her second marriage after a relationship with pornstar Pay Myne from 2003 to 2005. Two years later Daniels was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of domestic violence after hitting Mosny. According to police records, she threw a potted plant during an argument over laundry and unpaid bills. Mosny was not injured, the charge was dropped and Daniels and Mosny went on to divorce.

Six years later, in 2015, she married another porn industry colleague, Golden Crain (real name Brendon Miller), the father of her now-22-year-old daughter, Caden Crain. As a drummer, Crain often composed music for Daniels’ films and was often spotted with her at equestrian events. “We have this smart, amazing, beautiful daughter that is awesome,” she told an interviewer in 2012. “The three of us go to Gymboree class for music. He (Crain) is great with our daughter because he has no problems doing anything with her that I do. He will take her to the bathroom in a restaurant and change a dirty diaper.”

She described her typical day at the time: “We get up and watch Sesame Street every morning. I make her breakfast, and we hang out and are goofy for a while. Then we go out and run errands. I try to do something fun with her every day. I just consider myself to be especially blessed, and people who knock porn, well, it affords me to be with my daughter.”

Daniels filed for divorce from Crain in July 2018 and was booked to be a housemate on UK reality TV show Big Brother the following month, but dropped out five hours before the launch of the show citing her custody battle with Crain over their daughter.

She revealed she was bisexual in 2019 and married her fourth husband Barrett Blade (real name Russell Barrett) — another porn actor — in December 2022, after meeting in a bar 25 years ago and maintaining a friendship that eventually turned romantic. Alongside pornography, Blade owns a company named Alienwerxs, selling alien-themed clothing and Stormy Daniels merchandise including calendars and t-shirts.

Little is known about Daniels’ daughter Caden, but her private Instagram page suggests she is 22 and a keen golfer and Daniels recently referred to her as a “brilliant, straight-A student”. Meanwhile the pornstar is reportedly estranged from her mother Sheila, who brought her up and claimed to be a Trump supporter despite details of her daughter’s affair. She called Daniels’ “selfish” and “sex mad” when speaking to reporters in 2018. “Every seven-year-old needs their mom,” Sheila said of her daughter’s failed Big Brother appearance in 2018. “Why she ever thought she could go in Big Brother, who knows? Ever since she became an adult ­Stephanie has always been selfish... The only thing that seems to matter to her is herself – and the attention she gets from men.”

Daniels appears to feel similarly about her mother. “The only people who call me Stephanie are my mother and the IRS [Internal Revenue Service] and I hate them both,” she said several years ago.

Daniels’ public Instagram paints a picture of her life today: posing in cowboy hats and boots with the horses at her home in Forney, Texas; selfies on the set of her latest film; couple snaps with Blade on the farm and the red carpet.

According to reports, she has a net worth of around $2 million and she is clearly proud of her work in the porn industry, describing herself on Twitter as an “award-winning director, writer and adult film star” — but even she’s prouder of her self-appointed side hustle as Trump’s humiliator.

In 2021 she called her alleged sexual encounter with Trump “the worst 90 seconds of my life” and she has since made a career out of her association with the former president, writing a bestselling memoir, cashing in on multiple comedy tours and even being invited to speak at the Oxford and Cambridge Unions about the benefits of the porn industry and how it is one of the only sectors in which women can earn double that of men. Her wittily-named Make America Horny Again tour in 2018 was expertly timed to take place on the anniversary of Trump’s inauguration.

Her Twitter feed, which has 1.3 million followers, continues to be littered with cheeky quips from “save a horse. Ride a cowgirl” to fierce comebacks to Trump fans.

“Once impeached, always impeached,” she hit back at one who called her “once a hoe always a hoe” last year. “You sound even dumber than he does during his illiterate ramblings,” she replied to another. “I won’t walk, I’ll dance down the street when he is ‘selected’ to go to jail.”

She certainly seemed to determined to make that happen when she appeared in court this week. Taking to the stand in New York, she was warned to dial back her comments at times and commentators have described moments when she and Trump’s lawyer were “nearly yelling” at each other during one particularly heated cross-examination.

She told Trump's attorney Susan Necheles that she hates the former president, that she will never pay Trump the more than half a million dollars she reportedly owes him for a defamation case over a 2018 tweet that she lost, and that there was an “imbalance of power” between her and Trump during their 2006 encounter “for sure”.

The atmosphere was dark and heated, say reporters in the court, but Daniels showed glimmers of a lighter side, too, cracking jokes about unions in the porn industry and golf gags about holes. After a rollercoaster few years of entanglement with the former president, she seems ready to have some fun watching the next chapter in the Trump show and is ensuring she has the last laugh.

Whether she’ll have the last laugh or not remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure: without Daniels’ feisty and formidable tenacity in getting her voice heard, it’s highly unlikely Trump would be on trial at all.