Spritzler advice for a happy life: Do not cheat on your spouse. If you feel you must, avoid doing it with a porn star (and if blackmailed try to avoid paying he or she off).
Scrap that. Too complicated. Stay single and again avoid the porn star.
Stormy Daniels Helped Convict Trump, but She Has Unfinished Business With Him
The adult-film actress owes the former president hundreds of thousands of dollars in civil judgments. She’s vowed never to surrender a dime.
By Jacob Gershman, WSJ
June 7, 2024 8:00 am ET
The saga of Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels isn’t over yet.
The 45-year-old adult entertainer emerged vindicated from the former president’s hush-money criminal trial where her testimony about her alleged sexual encounter with the former president helped prosecutors secure a historic felony conviction.
The two still have unfinished business involving more than $600,000 in legal fees that Daniels owes Trump, according to his lawyers.
A week after a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty of falsifying records to conceal a scheme to keep Daniels quiet before the 2016 election, lawyers for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and Daniels squared off at a hearing in Palm Beach County circuit court related to the unpaid judgments.
The financial feud is a lingering subplot from a salacious political drama that burst into public view in 2018 when The Wall Street Journal broke the news that Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, had paid Daniels $130,000 so she wouldn’t air her claims that she had a one-night stand with Trump during a celebrity golf tournament at Lake Tahoe in 2006.
The scandal spun off into a defamation battle waged by Daniels against Trump that ended with the porn actress indebted to him.
That court fight erupted in 2018 after Daniels released a sketch of an unidentified man whom she claimed had threatened her in 2011 to keep quiet about her encounter with Trump. Daniels, then-represented by now-incarcerated celebrity lawyer Michael Avenatti, brought a lawsuit accusing Trump of defaming her when he tweeted that the sketch was a cooked-up “con job.”
Federal district and appellate courts rejected her case and have ordered Daniels to pay Trump several hundred thousand dollars plus interest—nearly all of it to cover Trump’s legal fees in the case.
Trump’s lawyers say Daniels, whose given name is Stephanie Clifford, hasn’t paid several judgments and accuse her of stonewalling their demands that she complete a sworn financial sheet disclosing her income and assets as required in Florida collection cases.
Four days after Daniels finished testifying in the hush-money trial, lawyers representing Trump in the Palm Beach case filed lengthy excerpts of her testimony pertaining to her finances and employment.
They highlighted lines from the transcript, including parts of her cross-examination when she was asked about social-media posts she wrote vowing never to surrender a dime to Trump, even if it meant jail time.
“I hope I don’t have to pay him, no matter what happens,” she testified.
A lawyer for Daniels declined to comment.
On Thursday, Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Maxine Cheesman ordered Daniels to complete the financial questionnaire, which Daniels so far has left mostly blank. “You have to comply with the form, and you need to do it quickly,” the judge told Daniels’s lawyer during a remote hearing.
Allison Friedman, a lawyer for Daniels, said at the hearing that she wanted to wait until she secured a confidentiality agreement over the materials.
“She had to wear a bulletproof vest to testify at trial,” Friedman said. “She has received death threats. Mr. Trump has a base that is willing to act at his request as we’ve seen from Jan. 6. She definitely needs confidentiality going forward.”
As the most famous witness for the prosecution in the hush-money trial, Daniels described an evening she spent with Trump at his hotel suite in Lake Tahoe in lurid detail.
Trump denies the two had sex, but Daniels told jurors a different story.
She said she thought she was going to get dinner and career advice from the reality-show star. But she said she somehow ended up disrobed on his bed and had brief sex. Daniels testified that she initially tried to leave when she saw that Trump had stripped to his underwear. He told her she would never “get out of that trailer park” if she left, according to Daniels.
Trump’s lawyers complained that her tell-all testimony was “extraordinarily prejudicial,” but the presiding judge pointed to times when his legal team could have objected but didn’t.
Trump’s criminal defense team tried to show that her association with him had been lucrative. She was asked about an $800,000 book deal she negotiated (nearly $300,000 of which Avenatti was convicted of plundering) and the $100,000 she was paid for her involvement in a Peacock original documentary about her life that was released in March ahead of the criminal trial.
She said she was fired from a short-lived paranormal-themed podcast because she didn’t discuss the Trump case enough. And she said she’s working on two more books due out next year.
Asked why she hadn’t paid Trump, she said, “I don’t have the means to pay that kind of funds, and because I didn’t think it was fair.”
Defense lawyer Susan Necheles pressed her during the criminal trial on whether she was hiding assets to dodge the judgments. Daniels said she wasn’t.
Daniels is now promoting a pair of sold-out stand-up shows in New Orleans.
After the verdict came down, she gave an interview to the British tabloid The Mirror. “I’m obviously glad of the verdict, because in a way it also proves that I was telling the truth,” she said.
Write to Jacob Gershman at jacob.gershman@wsj.com
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