EL Chapito/21M

Stormy Daniels says she spanked Donald Trump with a Forbes magazine and slept with him while his wife was home with their 4-month-old son. Then a stranger threatened her baby. Then she got $130,000 to shut up. That money made Trump the first US president convicted of a felony. It started in July 2006 at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe. She was a 27-year-old adult film star working the event, he was a 60-year-old reality TV host with a wife at home and a four-month-old son. She says he invited her to dinner in his hotel suite, where she swatted him with a rolled-up copy of Forbes with his face on the cover, and they slept together that night. Trump has always denied it ever happened. For five years she barely told anyone. Then in 2011 a tabloid called In Touch got hold of the story and she sat down with them for an interview. It never ran. Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen threatened to sue and the magazine shelved it. A few weeks later she was getting her daughter out of the car at a gym in Las Vegas when a stranger came up behind her and delivered the message. She says she was so scared she kept it to herself for years. In October 2016 the story came back. Trump was days away from winning the presidency and Cohen wired $130,000 through a shell company he set up in Delaware. She signed an NDA under a fake name, Peggy Peterson. Trump was listed as David Dennison. When the Wall Street Journal broke the story in 2018, she signed two statements denying the affair. She later said she was pressured into signing both of them. She says she had turned down far bigger offers over the years to tell the story. Then in March 2018 she went on 60 Minutes and told it for free. 22 million people watched. Cohen pleaded guilty, went to federal prison and turned on his former boss. In May 2024 a New York jury found Trump guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records connected to the payment. He became the first former president convicted of a felony and still won the election that November. Stormy lost her defamation case against him and was ordered to pay his legal fees, which ran into hundreds of thousands of dollars. She took $130,000 to stay quiet. Talking cost her more than the money ever paid. Do you believe Stormy Daniels, or do you think she made the whole thing up?