From their alleged tryst at Lake Tahoe to the lawsuit today.
On January 12,2018, the Wall Street Journal broke what appeared to be just another initially outrageous and quickly forgotten Donald Trump scandal.
The president, the Journal’s Michael Rothfeld and Joe Palazzolo reported, had paid porn performer/director Stormy Daniels (birth name Stephanie Clifford) $130,000 in October 2016 as part of a nondisclosure agreement. Daniels, they wrote, had “privately alleged” that she had a “sexual encounter” with Trump in July 2006 following a celebrity golf tournament at Lake Tahoe.
Normally, a president’s past affair with an adult film star would dominate news coverage. But this all happened the week that Trump referred to Haiti, El Salvador, and seemingly all countries in Africa as “shithole” countries, and the intervening months saw news coverage dominated by everything from the Parkland school shooting to Trump’s historic agreement to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un to the omnibus spending bill. It would’ve been understandable if “Donald Trump commits adultery” faded away as a story.
But it didn’t. The Stormy Daniels affair has had remarkable staying power, both because, after weeks of staying quiet, Daniels herself has decided she wants to tell her story, and because Trump and his legal team are going to extraordinary lengths to silence her, including demanding $20 million for violations of the nondisclosure agreement she and her legal team have allegedly already committed.
The story only gained traction after Daniels’s interview with 60 Minutes’ Anderson Cooper was broadcast on Sunday, March 25:
The slow progression of the scandal, however, has made its various twists and turns a bit difficult to follow. Here is everything you need to know about Daniels and Trump’s alleged affair, the “hush agreement” meant to silence her, and her subsequent legal fight to tell her story.
From July 13 to 16,2006, the Edgewood Tahoe Golf Course hosted the American Century Championship celebrity golf tournament, whose contestants included hockey legend Mario Lemieux, football players Drew Brees and Ben Roethlisberger, talk show host Maury Povich, comedians Ray Romano and Kevin Nealon, former Vice President Dan Quayle, and, of course, Donald Trump. Trump placed 62nd out of 80 .
During this tournament, Trump (who married Melania Trump about 18 months earlier, and whose son Barron had been born in March) allegedly propositioned or had sex with at least four women, three of them adult film actresses and the fourth a Playboy model.
jessica drake (who prefers her name be lowercase) says she met Trump in the Celebrity Gift Room “early in the morning” and gave him her phone number. Later that evening, she says, he invited her to his room, and she brought two friends with her. There, she claims, he groped and kissed each of them without consent and conducted what “felt like an interview” while wearing pajamas. Later that night, he offered drake money to come back to his room, and after she refused, she got another call, from either Trump or another man working on his behalf (she couldn’t tell), offering $10,000. She declined.
Stormy Daniels also says that she met Trump in the Celebrity Gift Room. Trump “was introduced to everybody,” Daniels said in an interview for In Touch conducted in 2011. “He kept looking at me and then we ended up riding to another hole on the same golf cart together.” The two had dinner in his room that night; she was, like drake, greeted by Trump’s bodyguard Keith Schiller, and Trump was, as in drake’s story, wearing pajama pants. It’s not clear if the drake and Daniels encounters occurred on the same night.
But unlike drake, Daniels says she consented to sex with Trump; they didn’t use a condom, owing to her latex allergy. She remembers talking afterward, with Trump telling her she was “someone to be reckoned with, beautiful and smart just like his daughter,” presumably referring to Ivanka. (Tiffany was then only 11.)
Daniels recounts repeatedly teasing and mocking Trump in a way that is striking, given Trump’s famously thin skin. “He said that he thought that if he cut his hair or changed it, that he would lose his power and his wealth,” she told In Touch . “And I laughed hysterically at him.… [H]e was like, ‘You know what? You’re really smart. You’re not dumb.’ And I was like, ‘Thanks, dick. What does that mean?’”
Trump, she recalls, kept offering to make her a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice. Once the interaction turned sexual, she was concerned he would attempt to pay her for it. “I do remember while we were having sex, I was like, ‘Please don’t try to pay me,’” Daniels told In Touch. “And then I remember thinking, ‘But I bet if he did, it would be a lot.’”
Daniels recalls hanging out with Trump and Ben Roethlisberger, the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback, the next night. Trump had to leave before they could be alone again, and asked Roethlisberger to escort her back to her room; Roethlisberger complied.
The third woman at the tournament was Alana Evans, a fellow adult performer and friend of Daniels’s. She told the Today show’s Megyn Kelly in January 2018 that Daniels invited her to “hang out” in a hotel room with her and Trump; she declined, thinking the invitation was for a threesome. (“If you’re inviting me to a hotel room to hang out with another man and a girlfriend of mine, it’s very easy for you to believe there’s going to be more going on than playing cards or Scrabble.”)
But the next day, she says, Daniels told her, “Picture this: Donald Trump chasing me around the bedroom in his tighty whities isn’t something that you ever forget.”
Karen McDougal, the 1998 Playboy Playmate of the Year, who had allegedly begun an affair with Trump the previous month (June 2006), has said she was also at the tournament. There, according to her handwritten account of the affair obtained by the New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow, she sat in a booth with Brees, the New Orleans Saints quarterback. She also claims that she and Trump had sex at the tournament. She reiterated her claim of an affair in a later interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
A lot happened at that tournament, but the ensuing events are more spread out. Here’s a basic timeline.
July 2006-spring 2010: Daniels says she and Trump communicated sporadically by phone. In her In Touch interview, Daniels says they talked “about every 10 days.” She attended the January 17,2017, launch of Trump Vodka in Hollywood and was photographed arriving:
She says that Trump invited her and her assistant to his personal office in Trump Tower in the winter of 2006-’07, when she was appearing at the New York City strip club Gallagher’s 2000 (a press release dates this to March 2007). This was a period when Daniels was unusually present in mainstream pop culture, due to appearances in the movies Blades of Glory and Knocked Up, which she told In Touch spurred Trump to call her whenever he recognized her.
In early 2008, she says, he contacted her to apologize for having Jenna Jameson, another adult performer, on Celebrity Apprentice . “I think he was afraid I was going to be pissed,” Daniels said. “So he called me and was like, ‘Did you see Jenna Jameson on my show? I didn’t know she was going to go on. That’s bullshit. She made a fool of herself.’ He said, ‘She’s a bimbo. You’re so much better.’ I was like, ‘I didn’t even know about it.’”
The last time he contacted her, she said in the interview, was in the spring/summer of 2010.
July 29 to August 4,2007: The Discovery Channel hosted Shark Week, and Donald Trump absolutely loves Shark Week. One day that week, in late July, Trump called Daniels to ask if she could meet him at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She says her then-boyfriend gave her a ride there, and Schiller the bodyguard once again walked her in. Trump had a private bungalow, where, as in Lake Tahoe, they ate dinner (with no alcohol, as Trump is a teetotaler).
“The strangest thing about that night — this was the best thing ever,” Daniels recalled to In Touch. “You could see the television from the little dining room table and he was watching Shark Week and he was watching a special about the U. S. something and it sank and it was like the worst shark attack in history. He is obsessed with sharks. Terrified of sharks. He was like, ‘I donate to all these charities and I would never donate to any charity that helps sharks. I hope all the sharks die.’ He was like riveted. He was like obsessed. It’s so strange, I know.”
After they finished dinner, Daniels said they “moved to the sofa so he could get a better view of Shark Week.” Trump broke the news to her that she wouldn’t be on Celebrity Apprentice; she recalls being “pretty annoyed.” Then this happened:
But she says she left after about two and a half hours there, and doesn’t mention Trump doing more than kissing her neck.
Daniels and her lawyer would later say that her “intimate relationship” with Trump continued “well into” the year 2007.
2007, date unclear: Former Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos alleges that, while in New York, she met with Trump in his office, where he twice kissed her on the lips without her consent. Later, because she still wanted to achieve her “dream of working for Mr. Trump,” she says she met him at a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, just as Stormy Daniels did.
After she waited about 15 minutes in the living room of the bungalow, she alleges that Trump “came to me and started kissing me open mouthed.” He then, per her account, kept aggressively kissing her and groped her breasts, without her consent and while she repeatedly pulled back and resisted. He “thrust his genitals” at her, and she rebuffed him, saying, “Dude, you’re trippin’ right now.” The two had dinner in the room, but Trump appeared angry and “started saying that he did not think that I had ever known love or had been in love.” She says Trump did not sexually harass her further but rebuffed her future attempts to work at the Trump Organization.
April 2007: Karen McDougal reportedly ended her affair with Trump, over her guilt for sleeping with a married man and anger over Trump’s vulgar remarks to a friend of hers.
May 16,2007: Radio shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge Clem, who would soon become well known for his then-wife’s sex tape with Hulk Hogan, hosted Daniels on his show, where they discussed famous men she had slept with. Clem will say in 2018 that during this appearance, Daniels told him about her affair with Trump, though neither she nor Clem said Trump’s name during the program.
April 15,2010: Daniels, who had been considering a bid for the US Senate in her home state of Louisiana, declined to run for the seat. She would later say that during this period, as her exploratory campaign was ending, Trump contacted her for the final time.
May 2011: Daniels gave an interview discussing Trump to In Touch’s Jordi Lippe-McGraw, which the magazine declined to publish until the scandal broke in January 2018, with the promise of $15,000 in compensation. In the interview, Daniels went into great detail about their sexual encounter at the Lake Tahoe golf tournament in July 2006, their subsequent communications, and the Beverly Hills Hotel encounter.
Her friend Randy Spears and ex-husband (boyfriend at the time of the alleged Trump affair) Mike Moz corroborated her story to the magazine.
May 19,2011: As part of her cooperation with In Touch, Daniels agreed to take a polygraph test to back up her statements. Seven years later, her polygraph examiner Ronald Slay signed a sworn affidavit stating that Daniels truthfully answered “yes” to three questions:
For what it’s worth, most serious researchers consider polygraph tests basically useless.
Spring/Summer 2011: In Touch declines to publish the story “because after the magazine called Mr. Trump seeking comment, his attorney Michael Cohen threatened to sue,” according to 60 Minutes’ Anderson Cooper. Daniels is not compensated and, she tells Cooper, was threatened in a parking lot in the presence of her infant daughter shortly thereafter:
October 10,2011: The gossip blog The Dirty published the first article directly accusing Trump of having an affair with Daniels. Both Trump and Daniels denied the story, and Daniels’s attorney Keith Davidson sent a cease-and-desist letter to The Dirty in retaliation.
August 2016: As the general election campaign between Trump and Hillary Clinton raged, Daniels began talking to Jacob Weisberg, the editor-in-chief of the Slate Group (which owns Slate and Foreign Policy magazines). She told Weisberg about meeting Trump in New York and Los Angeles, including about the Trump Vodka premiere.
“In our conversations, Daniels said she was holding back on the juiciest details, such as her ability to describe things about Trump that only someone who had seen him naked would know,” Weisberg later wrote. “She intimated that her view of his sexual skill was at odds with the remark attributed to Marla Maples .” (The “best sex I’ve ever had” was reportedly how then-girlfriend and future wife Maples described sex with Trump. Trump was still married to his first wife, Ivana Trump, at the time.)
Weisberg attempted to corroborate the story, and while Daniels did not share the contact information of some relevant witnesses (to wit, “Trump’s longtime personal assistant Rhona Graff and his bodyguard Keith Schiller”), he was able to speak with three friends who backed her up.
August 6,2016: McDougal, the former Playboy model turned fitness specialist with whom Trump allegedly had an affair, signed a nondisclosure deal with American Media Inc ., the parent company of the National Enquirer, for which she was paid $150,000 and promised she would be featured on the company’s magazine covers and in its health and fitness columns.
McDougal had, earlier that summer, worked with Keith Davidson (the same attorney that represented Daniels at this point) to reach a deal with AMI to sell the story of her affair with Trump for at least $500,000. But the company, which is run by a close friend of Trump’s, ultimately declined to buy the story. Then McDougal reached out to ABC News, after which AMI came forward with the offer to buy it and bury it.
Davidson and Trump Organization attorney Michael Cohen were reportedly in contact about the deal as it progressed.
October 7,2016: The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold published the Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump brags about sexually assaulting women. According to her later lawsuit, this led Daniels to want to tell her story to the media. She engaged in more conversations with reporters at this time, including Weisberg.
October 17,2016: The Trump Organization’s Cohen created Essential Consultants LLC, as a vehicle to quietly pay hush money to Daniels.
October 18,2016: The Smoking Gun, a news site specializing in mug shots and legal filings, published a piece by founder William Bastone featuring a photo of Trump and Daniels at the Lake Tahoe golf tournament. The piece added that Daniels “confided to friends that she engaged in a sexual affair with Trump, whom she claimed had promised to help her get cast on The Apprentice or another TV show.”
The story stopped short of outright alleging the two had an affair, quoting Daniels’s ex-husband Mike Moz as saying he was “not under the impression” that Daniels and Trump had an affair. The piece also alluded to Daniels’s interview with In Touch in 2011, though it didn’t name the magazine.
The piece failed to gain much traction in the chaos of the election’s final days.
Late October 2016: Daniels’s attorney, Keith Davidson, and Trump attorney Cohen negotiated a hush money deal. Daniels texted the deal to Slate’s Weisberg. “Daniels said she was talking to me and sharing these details because Trump was stalling on finalizing the confidentiality agreement and paying her,” Weisberg wrote later. “As an alternative to being paid for her silence, Daniels wanted to be paid for her story.” Slate does not pay for stories, so Weisberg made a counteroffer of an unpaid piece and an appearance on his podcast.
October 26,2016: To prove that he had the $130,000 necessary to pay Daniels as part of the nondisclosure deal being negotiated, Cohen forwarded to Davidson an email from a bank official confirming he had made a deposit to his checking account. The emails with the bank official were sent using Cohen’s official Trump Organization email, raising questions about the source of the funds.
October 27,2016: Cohen wired the $130,000 to Davidson, to pass on to Daniels.
October 28,2016: Daniels and Cohen (on behalf of Essential Consultants) signed the nondisclosure agreement (attached to the end of the following lawsuit by Daniels):
Notably, however, Trump himself did not sign the document.
Throughout the document, Daniels is referred to by the pseudonym “Peggy Peterson” (or “PP”) and Trump is referred to as “David Dennison” (or “DD”), to minimize the odds that their true identities could be made public.
A separate side letter agreement, also attached in the lawsuit, specifies that PP is a pseudonym for Daniels.
