Stormy Daniels took the witness stand in President Trump’s hush-money trial on Tuesday morning. The adult film star, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, told the jury about the sexual encounter she claims to have had with the former president in 2006. Mr. Trump fiercely denies the allegation.  

Before the highly anticipated witness was called to the stand, Mr. Trump’s defense attorneys renewed their objections to Ms. Clifford testifying about the details of the sexual act, which she has already recounted in great detail in her memoir, “Full Disclosure”. 

“The details of the encounter, your honor, are important,” said Susan Hoffinger, one of the prosecutors for the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, who brought the criminal case against Mr. Trump. “In terms of the sexual act,” she continued to explain, the details would be very basic, how Ms. Clifford “came to have sex and how she felt about it.”   

“Certain details are too salacious … Certain details are unnecessary,” one of the defense attorneys, Susan Necheles, insisted. “This a case about books and records.” 

Ms. Clifford’s 18 year-old story is at the heart of the trial, the first criminal trial ever brought against a former president in the history of the United States. The prosecution alleges that shortly before the 2016 election, Ms. Clifford signed a nondisclosure agreement to keep silent about her claim that she had sex with Mr. Trump and was paid $130,000 by Michael Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer and current nemesis. The prosecution further alleges that Mr. Trump directed this hush-money payment to hide the damaging information about his infidelity from voters, later reimbursed Cohen, and that when he paid the hush money back, he illegally disguised the payment as legal expenses.            

Mr. Trump had addressed this issue in the morning. Speaking to reporters outside of the courtroom, he said, “You pay a lawyer expense payments. We didn’t put it down as construction costs, the purchase of sheetrock, the electrical costs … the legal expense that we paid was put down as legal expense. There’s nothing else you could say. You don’t have to put down anything, I guess.”   

In the courtroom, Ms. Hoffinger argued that in respect to the details about Ms. Clifford’s account, they were important to establish her credibility, but that they were not to involve descriptions of the intercourse nor of the genitalia. 

Ms. Clifford entered the courtroom dressed casually in black, her hair loosely tied back. She began her testimony by telling the prosecution about her upbringing in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where she grew up in a poor neighborhood with the dream of becoming a veterinarian. She first danced ballet, and then started exotic dancing when she was in high school. 

“[A friend] was an exotic dancer and invited me to the club to dance, and they didn’t bother checking my ID,” Ms. Clifford said, and added that she could make more money in one weekend as an exotic dancer than she would “shoveling manure eight hours a day,” a reference to the horse stable where she worked.  

By age 23, Ms. Clifford had moved to Los Angeles and got her first porn star role in the adult film industry. She also began directing and writing the sexually explicit videos herself. “I was one of the youngest — if not the youngest — featured director,” Ms. Clifford proudly testified. 

The fact that Ms. Clifford also directed, she testified, impressed Mr. Trump. When he met her in July 2006 at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, he said to her that “you must be the smart one,” Ms. Clifford testified.  

“I didn’t know his age, but I knew he was as old as or older than my father,” Ms. Clifford said, noting her father was around 60, as was Mr. Trump in 2006. Ms. Clifford was 27 at the time. 

According to Ms. Clifford, Mr. Trump’s longtime bodyguard, Keith Schiller, told her that, “Mr. Trump was interested in having me join him for dinner,” Ms. Clifford detailed. When she shared this news with her then publicist, he encouraged her to accept the invitation. “He said, ‘I think you should go. It would make a great story. He is a business guy. What could possibly go wrong?’ That was his words to me,” Ms. Clifford remembered.

When she arrived at the penthouse in the hotel, Mr. Trump was “wearing silk or satin pajamas that I immediately made fun of him for. ‘Does Mr. Heffner know you stole his pajamas?’” He then changed into pants and a dress shirt, Ms. Clifford continued, adding that his hotel suite “was three times the size” of her apartment.

At first they started talking, Ms. Clifford recalled. Mr. Trump, she said, told her she reminded him of his daughter, she was smart and beautiful, and that people generally underestimated her. They discussed the possibility of her appearing on the celebrity edition of Mr. Trump’s hit NBC TV show, “The Apprentice.”

Then he asked if the adult film industry had unions, if actors received residuals, how they got paid, if she had health insurance, and finally, if she was tested for sexually transmitted diseases.  At one point Ms. Clifford went into the bathroom, and when she came out, she found Mr. Trump wearing his “boxer shorts and T-shirt,” she said.

“The next thing I know I was on the bed,” Ms. Clifford said. “I had my clothes and my shoes off. I believe my bra however was still on.”

“Was he wearing a condom?” Ms. Hoffinger asked.

“No,” Ms. Clifford answered.

“Was that concerning to you?” Ms. Hoffinger pressed.

“Yes,” Ms. Clifford said, and added that there was an “imbalance of power” though she did not feel threatened. “He was bigger and blocking the way. I was not threatened verbally or physically,” Ms. Clifford testified. After their encounter, Ms. Clifford said, Mr. Trump told her they should get together again, but she just left as fast as she could.

Ms. Clifford then described how she kept in contact with Mr. Trump, despite the fact that she did not enjoy their sexual encounter, and rejected further advances he made. During a visit to New York, she visited him at Trump Tower, where  he told her, “I am still working on the ‘Apprentice’ thing,” and promised to arrange tickets for her and her friend to a beauty pageant event in California, which he did.

In 2011, Ms. Clifford testified, she gave an interview about her sexual encounter with Mr. Trump to the celebrity glossy “InTouch,” after which she took and passed a lie detector test, as did one of her ex-husbands. In the interview, Ms. Clifford boasted that “I can describe his junk perfectly.”  

Shortly after the publication of the “InTouch” interview, she continued, a man she had never met before approached her in a Las Vegas parking lot and “threatened” her if she didn’t stop talking about her “encounter with Trump.”

“He told me not to say anything at all, and I was scared,” Ms. Clifford testified, adding that she did not call the police. Her talent manager, a former porn star named Gina Rodriguez, then introduced her to the attorney Keith Davidson.

“My motivation wasn’t money,” Daniels said. “It was to get the story out.”

InTouch magazine, which at the time was owned by a German media conglomerate, typically pays for interviews such as the one Ms. Clifford sat for. Five years later, she was shopping her story again.

In October 2016, shortly after the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape had just been leaked and weeks before ElectionDay, Ms. Clifford heard through Mr. Davidson that Cohen, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, was interested in paying her to keep quiet about her alleged fling with Mr. Trump. Ms. Clifford said that she was interested in the deal because it would keep her “safe and the story wouldn’t come out,” she testified. “It was motivated out of fear, not money,” she added, and assured the prosecution that she didn’t need money because, in 2016, her financial situation was the “best it’s ever been.”

Nevertheless, the negotiation was a financial one. Ms. Clifford told the prosecution that she became worried, when Cohen kept delaying his payment, that she wouldn’t get any money. Time was running out before Election Day after which, with Mr. Trump widely expected to lose, her story would lose currency.

But Ms. Daniels did get paid, and in 2018, after the deal became public, her life spun into “chaos,” she said, describing how she came under persistent abuse and harassment. 

“Who do you understand Mr. Trump to be referring to as horseface and sleazebag in this post?” the prosecutor, Ms. Hoffinger, asked her regarding a Twitter post. “Me,”  Ms. Clifford replied.

After the lunch break, Mr. Trump’s defense attorneys asked the judge for a mistrial over Ms. Clifford’s testimony. 

“We move for a mistrial based on the testimony this morning,” one of the defense attorneys, Todd Blanche, said. “There is no remedy that we can fashion … to unring this bell,” he added, saying that “aside from pure embarrassment,” the testimony was given to “inflame the jury.” 

The defense lawyer was referring to lewd details such as Ms. Clifford saying she rolled up a business magazine and spanked Mr. Trump with it. The judge agreed that “some things were better left unsaid” and that “the witness was not easy to control.” But he strongly disagreed with the defense that there had been no “guard rails” in place. He blamed the defense for not objecting more often, and noted that one time, he intervened where the defense could have easily raised an objection. 

“I am surprised that there were not more objections,” Judge Merchan said, and instructed the defense to take some responsibility. He denied the motion for mistrial and told the defense that the remedy would be cross examination. He added that he would give the jury instructions not to consider the story Ms. Clifford told about the parking lot, and being threatened by a man there if she didn’t stop talking about Mr. Trump, as fact.

However, the prosecution did get what it needed, testimony stating that there had indeed been negotiations between Ms. Clifford and Cohen, and that the deal was made and money was paid. The credibility of the witness and her intentions for selling the story lay before the defense like a wide open minefield, and Ms. Necheles began to take Ms. Clifford down that dangerous road on Thursday afternoon.

“You are making this up as you sit there?” Ms. Necheles asked, referring to sexual encounter Ms. Clifford claims to have had with Mr. Trump. 

“The whole story was made up, wasn’t it?” Mr. Necheles pressed. 

“None of it is made up,” Ms. Clifford responded.

“You have been making money by claiming you had sex with Donald Trump for more than a decade?” Ms. Necheles asked.

“I have been making money by telling my story about what happened to me,” Ms. Clifford replied. 

“And that story has made you a lot of money, right?” Ms. Necheles added. 

“It has also cost me a lot of money,” Ms. Clifford answered. 

Under questioning from the defense, Ms. Clifford said she “hates” Mr. Trump.

“I want him to be held accountable,” she said. Asked if that means she wants him in jail, she said, “If he’s convicted.”

On Tuesday, Mayor Eric Adams told reporters that New York City’s Department of Correction “is prepared for whatever comes on Rikers Island,” the notorious jail where Mr. Trump’s former chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, is already incarcerated. Judge Merchan threatened Mr. Trump on Monday with a jail sentence, should he continue to violate his gag order. 

The heated cross-examination will continue on Thursday. There is no court on Wednesdays, as Judge Merchan presides then over Manhattan Mental Health Court, which seeks to provide alternatives to incarceration for mentally ill offenders.