An attorney for Stormy Daniels, the adult film star at the center of former President Trump’s hush-money trial, said Friday that Trump’s recent conviction was a “huge blow to her.”
“We received a report from the court right away,” attorney Clark Brewster said. Said “So when I told her, it hadn’t even been in the news yet. She was totally surprised,” she said in an interview for NewsNation’s “Elizabeth Vargas Reports.”
“I think it was a culmination of a lot of things, that it was over and, you know, the anxiety and tension that she had been carrying all the way up to this,” he added, but said she didn’t express any “real joy” about the outcome: “It was more or less a relief that it was over.”
Trump became the first former president to be convicted of a crime when a 12-member jury found him guilty on Thursday on all 34 charges of falsifying business records in connection with his 2016 order to pay hush money to Daniels about an alleged past affair.
Brewster suggested his client may have been surprised by the sentence.
“She was really shocked that it was finally settled,” he said, “and we had a great talk and I told her how proud I was of her for what she’d been through.”
Brewster previously pointed out that Daniels wore a bulletproof vest until the moment she entered the Manhattan courtroom to testify in the high-stakes trial. Daniels also claims she accepted the money because she feared for her life.
“She was concerned about security coming into New York,” Brewster said during an appearance on CNN’s “AC360.” “She wore a bulletproof vest every day on the way to the courthouse.”
“I can assure you she cried herself to sleep before she arrived on Sunday,” he continued. “She was paralyzed not by fear of taking the witness stand or telling her story, but by fear of what some crazy person might do to her, and I’m deeply concerned about that.”
Trump now faces a sentencing date set by Judge Juan Marchan for July 11, just days before he is scheduled to become the Republican presidential nominee at the Republican National Convention. After being convicted, the former president slammed the judge and the trial.
“This has been a rigged and dishonorable trial,” Trump said. “The real verdict will be given by the American people on November 5th. The American people know what happened here, everybody knows what happened here.”
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