Stormy Daniels, the adult film actress who says she had sex with former President Trump in 2006, took the stand again Thursday during his New York trial. A few times, Trump lawyer Susan Necheles suggested that the entire story was fabricated. No, Daniels said. "If that story was untrue, I would have written it to be a lot better." During cross-examination, Necheles suggested Daniels had given different accounts at different times about her purported 2006 encounter with Trump and implied she is motivated by a combination of financial greed and personal animus. In total, Daniels was on the stand for roughly eight hours over those two days, the Hill reports.Â
Daniels’s allegation that she had sex with Trump during a celebrity golf event in Lake Tahoe set in chain a series of events that has led to the first criminal trial of a former president. Trump is charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, during the closing stretch of the 2016 presidential campaign, when she was paid $130,000 by Trump’s then-attorney and fixer, Michael Cohen, with the intention of buying her silence. Trump denies having sex with Daniels and also denies any illegality, arguing that the payments to Cohen were indeed legal expenses. On Thursdays, the court also heard from three other witnesses — a bookkeeper at the Trump Organization, a publishing executive, and Trump’s former personal secretary in the White House, Madeleine Westerhout.