new york — Former President Trump’s lawyers tried to undermine Stormy Daniels’ credibility with Trump’s trial jury by portraying her as motivated by money, but this was because Daniels had a career as a porn actor. , suggesting that he had experience selling fictional stories about sex.
In some of the toughest cross-examination ever of a prosecution witness, Daniels said the defense changed her testimony about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump that led to the hush money payments at the center of the ongoing criminal trial. criticized.
Trump lawyer Susan Necheres, the only woman to defend Trump at trial, has been trying to paint the adult film star not only as an irrelevant witness but also as an unreliable witness since Daniels claimed an affair with Trump. He slammed Daniels over the profits he earned. was denied.
During three hours of questioning over two days, defense attorneys implied that Daniels’ work as a porn star was preparing her to make money.
“You have a lot of experience making false stories about sex seem real, right?” Necheres asked Thursday.
Daniels laughed indignantly and said that wasn’t the way she said it.
“I have a history of memorizing conversations, not how to have sex… I’m sure everyone knows how,” she retorted.
Moments later, Daniels returned to her accusations against Trump, joking: “If that story had been false, I would have written it better.”
Daniels claims she met Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in 2006, where he invited her to have dinner with him through his bodyguard. However, she claimed that once she went up to her suite, she was denied dinner and had sex instead.
Mr. Necheres denied the story, claiming that Mr. Daniels had previously told Gossip magazine and “60 Minutes” that he had dinner with Mr. Trump. Daniels claimed that it was “dinner time” but that she had not eaten.
“In all these interviews, I would talk about food,” Daniels pushed back. “I’m very interested in food.”
On the first day of cross-examination, Daniels appeared disheveled and was easily fooled by Necheres. On Tuesday, she spoke quickly and repeatedly asked to slow down, but she became easily irritated by the defense’s efforts to trip her up.
But by Thursday morning, Daniels appeared more calm, pushing back against defense arguments with which he disagreed but remained calm.
Necheles repeatedly tried to trick Daniels into telling her that her encounter with the former president was a fabrication. Her lawyers grilled her about what Daniels had said in her previous interview and what happened in the Florida hotel suite.
“The whole story has changed, hasn’t it?” Necheres asked at one point.
“No, it hasn’t. They’re trying to say it’s changed, but it hasn’t,” Daniels replied.
Necheres also portrayed Daniels as having an ax to grind against Trump, as she lost a defamation lawsuit against the former president and is now owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees.
The jury saw a repost from Daniels in late March of someone calling her a “human urinal.”
“That’s right! Makes me the perfect person to shed the orange filth,” she replied on social platform X, in an apparent reference to the trial.
On Tuesday, Daniels told Necheles, “Yes,” when asked if she disliked President Trump.
And when asked if she wanted him to go to jail, the porn actor replied:
Jurors appeared more engaged Thursday than they were on Tuesday, when cross-examination began, occasionally exchanging glances during heated exchanges or objections.
President Trump is on trial on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records for allegedly illegally concealing hush money paid by former fixer Michael Cohen to keep Daniels quiet during the final stages of the 2016 campaign. It is. Mr. Trump has maintained his innocence.
It wasn’t until the final moments of cross-examination that Mr. Necheres brought up the actual documents that tallied Mr. Trump’s crimes. The defense is trying to convince jurors that Daniels’ testimony, while sordid, is legally irrelevant.
Daniels acknowledged that she never spoke to Trump about the hush money and was not personally involved in the repayment plan the former president is accused of. Trump nodded affirmatively, noting his lack of knowledge about his own role in the hush-money deal.
“I’m just here to answer questions about me,” Daniels told Necheres.
“You don’t know about this indictment?” she asked after a moment.
“There are a lot of indictments,” Daniels replied.
After Mr. Daniels left the witness stand, prosecutors called the Trump Organization’s bookkeeper and shifted the storyline again away from the sordid hush-money deals at the heart of the case.
Prosecutors plan to soon call Cohen, the star witness who paid Daniels $130,000, as they near the end of their lead case.
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