I was already terrified, but now I was worried that I was going to deliver this baby with a doctor that I had never met before. And in walks Dr. Steven Harter, the most sought-after obstetrician in Las Vegas. With his pro-mom approach and amazing bedside manner, women plan their entire births around his availability. And here he was, on rotation that night.
“We think that you are too tired to push and your body knows that,” Dr. Harter told me. “Because if it finished dilating, you won’t have the strength to get the baby out. So, your labor is stalling. Here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re going to give you an epidural so you don’t feel anything, which just means you can take a nap. You won’t feel your contractions, and I bet when you wake up you’ll be refreshed and ready to push.”
“Okay,” I said, “sounds great.”
The anesthesiologist came in to give me the epidural, and Glen’s face went white at the sight of the needle. The anesthesiologist put it in, and the pain went away immediately. I was so thankful, I tried to kiss the anesthesiologist.
Thirty seconds after my pain completely went away, hunger pangs started, as if my stomach was going to rip itself open. I hadn’t eaten for two and a half days, and the epidural couldn’t mask that. There was no way I could sleep when I was this hungry. A nurse happened to come in to ask if there was anything she could do for me.
“I’m starving,” I said. “Is there some food—”
“You can’t have anything to eat,” she scolded. She said something else, but all I heard was “Blah blah blah ice chips.” And she left.
I waited until that door closed.
“Glen, come here,” I said. “Closer.” I reached up my hand, as if to gently touch his face, and I grabbed him by the throat.
“Vending machine. Now.”
“But she said…”
I tightened my grip. “Okay,” he croaked out.
He came back with an armful of stuff. “I didn’t know what you wanted,” he said. “Pick what you want.”
“Yes,” I said, grabbing everything.
I ate everything and then passed out. Glen immediately fell asleep in a chair across from me because he was so exhausted, too. Two hours later, in came the nasty intake nurse.
She pulled back my covers and shrieked. I was covered in crumbs and wrappers.
“WHAT?” I said, with all the menace I could muster. “What?”
She huffed and walked out, saying she was going to tell the doctor. Snitch. Dr. Harter came in and was cool about it. “It’s fine,” he said. “You’ve been through a lot.” He checked my cervix and there was still no progression. He told me the only thing they could do was give me Pitocin. I had been against inducing, which is what Pitocin is all about, but I was willing to try anything at that point. Besides, every hour I was at the hospital, I was running up a bill. All I was hearing was cha-ching, cha-ching.
At seven in the morning there was still no progress, so I scheduled the C-section. Now, I already told you that I was paranoid about being in a hospital. I have to tell you that I also had an irrational fear that someone was going to give me the wrong baby. Judge all you want, but that’s the kind of thing that would happen to me. I knew it takes like a minute to get the baby out and twenty minutes to get you back together, so I made Glen promise that when they took the baby out of the operating room, he had to go with her.
Fun fact: when they give you a C-section, most doctors strap your arms down. Dr. Harter said he could take the straps off, thank God. “You promise you’re not going to sit up and reach down and pull out your own organs or punch me in the face?”
“I promise,” I said.
Glen had his camera and filmed the whole thing. It is graphic as fuck and it took me a long time to watch it. It’s very … red.
Dr. Harter had his iPod going during the surgery and was rocking out to Led Zeppelin. The moment my daughter was born, Alanis Morissette’s “Thank U” filled the room. Once again, Alanis was there with just the right song at just the right moment. Dr. Harter pulled her out and said, “Oh, boy!”
“What?” I said. “It’s a girl, right?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “She’s just so big.”
He handed her off to the nurses, and they took her over to a warming cart to weigh her. She was almost nine pounds and long, twenty-three inches. But the room was very, very quiet, with only Alanis singing.
The baby wasn’t crying.
I know from the video that the nurses looked quizzical and started rubbing the baby. Glen put the camera down. In the video, you just see the floor and only hear us talking.
“Wha—what’s wrong?” he says. “Something wrong?”
They don’t answer but focus on rubbing her.
“Step back for a second, sir,” says a nurse.
“What’s wrong?” Glen asks again.
“WHAT’S WRONG?” you hear me scream.
Our baby let out the smallest cry.
“All right, she’s good,” says the doctor.
Then my husband let out the biggest cry. Glen, who had stood by me through all this, who had been so scared for me and for her, broke.
You just hear him sobbing on the video, sputtering out, “She’s—” Sob. “So—” Sob. “Beautiful.”
It sounded so funny and ridiculous that I slapped my hand to my forehead. As soon as he left with the baby and two of the nurses, the remaining nurses broke into laughter. I started to laugh and they had to yell at me. “Stop laughing!” one said. “Stuff is gonna fly out of you.”
“Well,” said the doctor, “he’s an emotional guy.”
“Yeah,” I said. “He feels things.”
“All right, look,” he said, conspiratorially. “I made your incision especially low and very small. I’m going to take extra time closing it up.”
“Oh, thank you,” I said.
Dr. Harter smiled. “I’m gonna have you back in front of the camera in no time.”
I had never told him who I was, but he recognized me. I smiled back at him. And yes, I have the best C-section scar. I love my fans.
SEVEN
At first, I figured it had to be about the cigarettes. Glen quit smoking the day our daughter was born, so maybe that was the problem. Then I thought it was lack of sleep and the stress of being a parent to a newborn after a traumatic delivery—all of those things are very normal. Because within the first few days of her life, Glen went completely, well, insane.
I like to say I didn’t get postpartum depression, but he did. He wasn’t sleeping, which wasn’t really so much because of our having a baby in the house, because she was such a good sleeper from the beginning. I remember standing by her crib, whispering, “For the love of God, wake up! My tits are gonna explode.”
Glen would appear manic, starting a project and leaving it unfinished because he moved on to another one. “Sit down, Glen,” I said countless times, “you’re making me nervous.” He would look at her and start crying and get emotional.
Finally, he broke down. “I always had a problem with the fact that my dad never said ‘I love you,’” he told me. “Now that I have her, and I look at her, I can’t imagine why a parent wouldn’t tell a child that they loved them. I can’t imagine a day going by without saying it to her. So I am going to make sure I tell her every single day that I love her.”
(Now she is like, “I get it.” Because he tells her a hundred times a day. There will never be a doubt in my mind that my daughter knows her father loves her.)
Glen’s intense love and adoration for our perfect baby girl brought up painful memories from his childhood. He was having what he thought were nightmares, which he came to feel were repressed memories of abuse he went through as a kid. The memories were triggered by seeing how vulnerable our daughter was, and he coped by using alcohol. He told me he had thoughts of suicide, feeling he was unworthy of having a family. He was drinking all day every day and having a lot of problems with his band.
And I had a newborn and I’d gained ninety-
three pounds. I was still leaking out of everywhere, and I had had the whole plan that I would deliver naturally—not two weeks late by cesarean—and do some miracle snapback in time to be at the January AVN Awards, my industry’s version of the Oscars.
In the middle of this shit blizzard, my phone rang. I was holding my daughter in our living room, probably wearing the same shirt I’d worn yesterday.
“Daniels. Spears. Wassup?”
I recognized Randy Spears’s voice immediately. He had been at Wicked during the Trump time. He had recently left the business, but had married and then divorced a woman who was a porn veteran, Gina Rodriguez. She’s found her real calling as an entertainment manager with a specialty for handling mistresses, secret sexters, and D-listers looking to either extend their fifteen minutes of fame or at least get a payoff. Her big break was the slew of Tiger Woods mistresses selling their sexts and stories to the highest tabloid bidders.
“Hey, so I was just talking about you and somehow it came up,” he said, “that you knew Donald Trump.”
I rolled my eyes but said nothing. Somehow. I really liked Randy, but it did me no good to talk.
“Gina wants to talk to you about it,” he said. Glen was outside, and I didn’t want to risk having this conversation in front of him.
“I’m really not—”
This bright voice came on. “You know, I could probably help you tell your story.”
“No, I am not interested.”
“Well, my partner Gloria Allred wants to talk to you.”
“Who is that?”
I was probably the only person on the planet who didn’t know who this person was. I know now that she’s a lawyer who specializes in high-profile cheating and harassment scandals. She worked with Gina on presenting Joslyn James as a former mistress seeking an apology from Tiger Woods for leading her on.
“Look her up,” Gina said. “I gave her your number.”
Sure enough, Gloria Allred called me. I was folding baby clothes in the living room. My daughter was on her back on a blanket next to me, and I sent Glen out on a Walmart run.
“Okay, what’s your story?” Gloria said.
I paused. I wanted to tell her that I was an accomplished star, writer, and director of adult films, plus I had just had a baby who was clearly exceptional because I had seen other brats in my day. And my hot husband was going through a lot, but I loved him and he adored our child. Oh, and I had to lose ninety-three pounds because the AVN Awards, my industry’s biggest night of the year, was in a couple of weeks and those bitches were just waiting for me to roll in. Meanwhile, yes, I was still leaking out of places.
But I knew she didn’t care about that.
I barreled through an extremely abbreviated version of my interactions with Donald Trump, leaving out sex and anything in the least bit interesting.
“Is there anything more?” she asked.
“No,” I said, putting a finger close to my daughter’s hand so she could hold it.
“Well, I really can’t do anything for you if that’s all there is.”
“Sorry,” I said.
I hung up and that was that, right? A couple of months went by, and I was still trying to lose the weight and fully recover so I could go back to work. I did two years’ worth of work in one year in anticipation of being out of commission for a while, but I hadn’t counted on my daughter being late and me needing a cesarean.
In March 2011, I got another call from Gina. “Oh, my God,” she said, panic in her voice. “Have you seen the internet?”
That seemed so strange. Like she was asking if I was familiar with this new and exciting invention where people can find facts and naked pictures.
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“There’s a story about you and Trump on The Dirty,” she said.
“The what?”
“The Dirty,” she said. “It’s a gossip site.”
“How is there a story about me on there?”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “Do you want me to ask my attorney to have it removed?”
“What are you talking about? What does it say?” I went over to my computer and was trying to find it online when she started reading it to me, saying I had had an affair with Trump. It said a friend leaked it.
“So, do you want my attorney, Keith Davidson, to send them a letter?”
“YES!” I yelled. It seemed perfect. My only thought was, This needs to go away. Glen was a mess, I was a mess—we were in no position to suddenly have a spotlight on us.
The story was down in a couple of hours. Now that I have seen so many incorrect things about me printed and posted, I realize that is fast. Extremely fast.
That’s how Keith Davidson entered my life. I didn’t know that Davidson’s specialty was brokering sex tapes and the like. At the time, it just seemed like I’d been saved from humiliation. Glen was not going to be looking at a gossip website I had never heard of. I had shut it down.
It was quiet, and I went back to the work of getting in shape. Twice a week, I did MamaFit workout classes, where I could take my daughter with me. I was trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. I was also trying to help Glen get his life back in order. He’d been through a lot and was starting to think he would benefit from professional help. Which costs money, which meant I had to get back to work.
Just a couple of weeks after Keith and Gina came to my rescue taking down the story from The Dirty, I got a call from In Touch. And now they had the story. This stranger on the phone told me my story. They had about 80 percent of the details and made it all a little more sensational around the edges. Like a romance novel version of some hot and heavy affair. Um, are you into sharks? I thought.
“I have no comment,” I said. “I’m not talking.”
“Well, we’re going to run the story anyway,” I recall the person saying. “So, you have two options: You can either tell us the story in your words and get compensated for it. Or we’ll run the version we have, which may or may not be accurate, and someone else gets the money.”
“I don’t…” I said.
“Well, think about it.”
Who was this “someone else” telling my story? People think I approached In Touch with the story, but I never would have done that. I called Gina in a panic, and she put it in my head that it was my ex-husband Mike Moz. He did seem like a good candidate, and I 100 percent believed her at the time. He was smart enough to have come up with the plan, and he had about 80 percent of the story. It all pointed directly to him.
“I could get you fifteen thousand dollars for this story,” Gina said. “Do you really want to hand him fifteen grand?”
“Well, no.”
“It’s going to come out anyway, so you might as well have control over it and compensation,” she said. “We can make a ton of money and you can have them make the check out to your daughter.”
We were running out of money and nothing had worked the way it was supposed to. And also, my feeling was Fuck you, Mike Moz. I didn’t want him profiting off my life any more than he already had.
I agreed to do an interview, which I did over the phone. I talked about Trump’s promise to get me on The Apprentice but left out his plan to help me once I was on the show. We talked for an hour to this nice girl who asked me things like “Was the sex romantic?” I know even she has been in the media echo chamber, repeatedly telling her story about me telling my story, but I wouldn’t remember her name if you put a gun to my head. When that was done, I got another call from an editor at In Touch.
“You know, this writer put this together,” said the editor, “and it seems so far-fetched. Is this real?”
“Yeah.” What seemed so far-fetched? Was it the spanking? Shark Week? That I had a brain?
“Well, you’re gonna have to take a lie detector test.”
“Are you calling me a liar?”
“We’d like to be sure.”
“Fuck, yeah,” I said, because I hate being called
a liar. Later that month, I went to take a lie detector test, and a polygraph expert named Ron Slay asked me about a hundred questions. He later submitted a sworn statement that read like a report card. “Ms. Clifford presented herself well in outward appearance of credibility,” said Slay. “There were no observable indications of intent to deceive.” And then the money shot: “In the opinion of this examiner Ms. Clifford is truthful about having unprotected vaginal intercourse with Donald Trump in July 2006.” Ding, ding, ding—told ya I wasn’t a liar.
Gina called. She was cooking up a plan. “Let this In Touch thing come out,” she said, “and then you’re going to go quiet and everyone’s going to be trying to take a picture of you.”
“Oh, God, no,” I said.
“And then we can sell a photo shoot of you.”
“No photo shoots of me,” I said. “I look so bad.”
Gina wasn’t listening. She was excited about all the TV shows she was going to shop my story to. She said that after the In Touch interview, she had some British tabloid lined up to pay half a million dollars for my story.
I hung up and said to myself, This cannot happen. Mainly because I still hadn’t told Glen. I would think about it in the middle of the night, but come morning I always lost my nerve. Glen’s behavior had become so erratic that I didn’t dare add any additional stress to him. He was talking about us being better off without him, and he wasn’t just talk. One day I was driving with him when he suddenly opened the passenger-side door and made a move to jump out. I grabbed him by the belt, screaming at him as I drove with one hand and slowed down.
I didn’t know what this would do to him. I had been secretly hoping I would somehow fail the lie detector test and the whole story would go away. I’d be out the money, but fifteen thousand dollars was pennies compared to what I would be spending going forward. The only reason I was doing it was because of that “someone else” willing to tell my story.
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