Unlock Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, editor of the FT, picks her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Stormy Daniels, the adult film actor at the center of Donald Trump’s “hush money” case, is expected to testify Tuesday at the former president’s criminal trial in Manhattan.
The 45-year-old, who was paid $130,000 to keep quiet about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, will take the stand after questioning a Penguin Random House publishing executive concludes, a Trump lawyer said.
Trump is accused of falsifying the business documents behind the payments. The presumptive Republican presidential candidate, who married his third wife Melania a year before the alleged encounter, has always denied any romantic relationship with Daniels.
Prosecutors have alleged that Trump ordered his former aide Michael Cohen to pay off Daniels because he feared the revelations would cost him the 2016 election and that the transactions therefore amounted to an attempt to “corrupt” the democratic process.
Early Tuesday morning, Trump ranted that he had “only recently been informed of the next witness” in a Truth Social post that was shortly deleted. The 77-year-old was warned by the trial judge that he would be jailed if he continued to violate a court-imposed silence order by attacking witnesses and jurors in the trial.
On the way to court, Trump continued to rail against the case, claiming it came “from the White House.”
“It’s all Biden because it’s an attack on his political opponent that’s never been seen before in this country,” Trump said. “The trial is a very unfair trial, a very, very unfair trial. The good news is they have nothing.”
Trump was accompanied in court by his son Eric and his close adviser Boris Epshteyn, in addition to his legal team.
His lawyers protested Tuesday against prosecutors allowing lurid details about sexual acts to be extracted from Daniels, claiming such evidence would be “unduly prejudicial.” Judge Juan Merchan said he agreed the witness had “credibility issues” but allowed questioning about the general details of her alleged encounter.
Trump’s lawyers had tried to stop Daniels from even appearing in court, arguing that she would use the event to “monetize” her story. Your requests have been rejected.
Daniels initially denied the affair and then broke a nondisclosure agreement signed after the Cohen payments when she made the encounter public while Trump was still president.