The Catharsis of Stormy Daniels Taking Down Trump

Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Getty Images

If Donald Trump ends up in a jail cell this year, it will be thanks in part to the remarkable testimony of a porn star whom he’s been doing everything in his power to shame, silence, and discredit for eight years. On Thursday, a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty on 34 felony charges of falsifying business records related to hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels, making him the first president in U.S. history to be convicted of a crime.

Daniels took the stand earlier this month and described in graphic detail her sexual encounter with Trump in his hotel room at a Lake Tahoe golf tournament in 2006, which he later paid her (via his then-fixer Michael Cohen) to keep quiet about during his 2016 presidential campaign. She told the court that Trump told her she reminded him of his daughter, Ivanka, and that she spanked him “right on the butt” at one point with a rolled-up magazine. When she started to describe the actual sex, Trump’s defense lawyer objected, and Judge Juan Merchan agreed that “the degree of the detail we’re going into is just unnecessary.” (Trump reportedly muttered “Bullshit” in the courtroom when Daniels told the spanking anecdote, one of the rare times he managed to stay awake throughout the trial.)

Then, during cross-examination, Trump attorney Susan Necheles tried to make the case that Daniels was not a credible witness because of her work in the adult-film industry and her “selling herself” as an exotic dancer. “You have a lot of experience making phony stories about sex,” Necheles sneered at Daniels in one pointed exchange. Daniels maintained her composure — despite the slights on her successful porn career in the most high-profile trial of the century with the former president staring her down right there in the courtroom. “That’s not how I would put it,” she said. “The sex in the films is very much real, just like what happened to me in that room.” She later testified that if her story about Trump “was untrue, I would have written it to be a lot better.”

The defense’s transparent slut-shaming failed to win over the jury, and Daniels’s testimony managed to help convict the former leader of the free world. As a woman, seeing that outcome today — after E. Jean Carroll, who accused Trump of raping her in the 1990s, defeated him twice in civil trials for defamation (and she may sue him yet again) — feels like poetic justice.

Trump ascended to the presidency after bragging on tape that he can “grab” women “by the pussy” whenever he wants because he’s a “star.” He has been accused by over a dozen women of sexual misconduct, been found civilly liable for rape, bragged about personally getting Roe v. Wade overturned, and called women “dogs” and “fat pigs.” Both Daniels and Carroll were smeared as lying grifters throughout their trials and have said they were threatened by Trump’s supporters; Daniels’s lawyer said Daniels even had to wear a bulletproof vest to go testify. So there’s an immense catharsis in watching these women claim victory against Trump in court — one making him pay hundreds of millions in damages, and the other, complicating his reelection chances and putting him behind bars. (And on top of that, Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis managed to fend off a Trump lawyer’s egregious grilling about her personal life and will continue to prosecute the election-interference case against him in Georgia, so a third woman could deal a legal blow to the former president.)

In one of his many false campaign promises, Trump said back in 2016 that if elected, one of his first moves as president would be to sue all the women who’d accused him of sexual assault and harassment. Instead, he’s spent the past year of his campaign for a second term being sued and criminally indicted himself with two of the women whom he cast as unhinged extortionists turning out to be some of his most formidable opponents in court. The “pussies,” one could say, have grabbed back.