Stormy Daniels, the adult movie star who received hush-money payments at the center of one of Donald Trump’s pending criminal cases, says she is “so tired” as she confronts the prospect of testifying against the former president, whose supporters have flooded her social media accounts with threats.
“I’m desensitized to some of it … but I’m also tired,” Daniels says in a new documentary premiering on Monday on Peacock, according to Slate, which reported viewing the film in advance. “Like, my soul is so tired. And I don’t know if I’m so much a warrior now as out of fucks, man. I’m out of fucks.”
Daniels’ remarks in the documentary, titled Stormy, are meant to illustrate how overwhelmed, exhausted and – at times – hopeless she has felt since she accepted a $130,000 payment before Trump’s 2016 presidential election victory to keep quiet about an extramarital sexual encounter she says she had with him a decade earlier.
Authorities allege that they later learned the payment to Daniels – whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford – was falsely recorded as a legal expenses reimbursement from Trump to the attorney who made the transaction and later pleaded guilty to violating campaign finance law, Michael Cohen.
Trump has denied having a sexual encounter with Daniels, has pleaded not guilty to charges of falsifying business records that were filed against him by New York state prosecutors, and is facing a trial date tentatively set for April at the earliest.
Caught in the middle of the slowly unwinding legalities is Daniels, who is shown in Stormy telling a journalist that one of the reasons she accepted Trump’s hush money was to establish a “money trail” that linked her to him – “so he could not have me killed”, as she put it.
After all, Daniels recalls in the film, a friend had admonished her that the Republican party under Trump’s command likes “to make [its] problems go away”, Slate noted. The film also reportedly shows a horse belonging to Daniels with a wound in its flank – she explains how she fears it may have been inflicted by someone who fired a rubber bullet at the animal in hopes of drawing its owner out into the open.
Daniels also details how much mental anguish she suffers from the invective aimed at her online by Trump supporters reacting to coverage of the criminal charges against him. Some of the comments are insulting and misogynistic – “liar”, “slut” and “gold digger” – but stop short of violence.
Others that she cites are overtly violent. “It is … ‘I’m going to come to your house and slit your throat.’ ‘Your daughter should be euthanized,’” Daniels says in the documentary, according to Slate. “They’re not even using bot accounts. They’re using real accounts.”
It was enough to prompt Daniels to record a last will and testament outlining how she wanted her affairs handled in the event of her untimely death. While many people take such a step as a standard part of their life’s long-term planning, Daniels did so under circumstances few ever have to confront, a journalist who captured video footage seen in the documentary suggested.
“When I met Stormy, she was convinced she was living in the last weeks or months of her life,” that journalist, Denver Nicks, says in the documentary, according to Slate.
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Daniels says she has acquired a measure of “legal knowledge” that has left her better positioned to navigate her role in the case against Trump than when the hush-money payment first became public in 2018. But at times it has also forced her to be away from family – whether for safety reasons or to exert whatever control that she can over her public narrative.
One such instance was in April 2023, when she was on a media tour in the UK shortly after Trump was indicted in connection with her case and learned that her 11-year-old daughter had finished her school year with a straight A report card over a text message rather than in person.
“Instead of being there with her, I’m here talking about an ex-president’s penis,” Daniels reportedly tells the documentary film-makers, a remark that possibly contained an allusion to her 2018 book which compared Trump’s reproductive organ to a toadstool.
Besides the Daniels case, Trump is also facing dozens of criminal charges for subverting the outcome of his failed 2020 re-election bid as well as retention of classified documents. A separate civil jury verdict has also found him liable for the sexual abuse of writer E Jean Carroll, and he has also been adjudicated a business fraudster in a lawsuit over his entrepreneurial practices.
Trump nonetheless has clinched the Republican nomination to challenge Democratic incumbent Joe Biden for a second presidential term in November.
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