The court transcript and eyewitness accounts cannot do justice to the entertainment value of Stormy Daniels’s testimony in Donald Trump’s felony trial on Tuesday.
But those of us inside the courtroom are uncertain of her impact on the case, especially since we haven’t yet heard all of what will surely be a long and blistering cross-examination.
The poised, smart and sassy black-clad witness — blond in front and brunette in back, with a big tattoo on her right lower arm — told a story that is familiar to tabloid aficionados but became much more powerful in court.
She spared no juicy details, from exactly and convincingly explaining how she met Trump at a 2006 golf tournament in Lake Tahoe; how he met her in his hotel suite clad in pajamas and she teased him about thinking he was Hugh Hefner; how Trump, sprawled in his boxer shorts on the bed, surprised her when she came out of the bathroom; how they had brief sex, though her mention of “the missionary position” was stricken from the record; how Trump invited her to other events with the lure of a possible appearance on “Celebrity Apprentice” before, more recently, describing her as “Horseface” and a “sleaze bag.”
Trump has denied everything except meeting Daniels briefly in Lake Tahoe. After hearing her testimony, it’s hard to imagine any jurors believing him.
But that hardly means they bought all of Daniels’s testimony. The least credible part came when she claimed that she was not in it for the money, but for “safety” because she had been confronted by a menacing man in a Las Vegas parking lot in the presence of her daughter.
My sense is jurors intuited that she would feel safer if she either signed the nondisclosure agreement, protecting her from threats, or went public with the sexual encounter, which would mean that if something bad happened to her, everyone would know why.
I asked several women in the courtroom how they thought women on the jury would react and opinion was divided, with some saying Daniels came across as self-regarding and untrustworthy. What we all agree on is that juries typically respond to real and assumed messages from the judge.
It helped the defense that Justice Juan Merchan sustained almost all objections to details in her testimony and, when the defense lawyers failed to object, did it for them.
Before the jury was summoned back from its lunch break, the defense made a motion for a mistrial, saying the details were too prejudicial.
But Merchan rejected the motion. He said “some things should probably have been better left unsaid,” but in fairness to the prosecution, “the witness was a little hard to control.” When he added, “I was surprised that there were not more objections,” I imagined steam coming out of Trump’s ears.
Even before cross-examination, it was clear Daniels had a lot of questions to answer about how she has exploited her time in the spotlight.
But my guess is that jurors will eventually conclude her testimony was a fun but fundamentally irrelevant part of this trial.