Finally, I started easing Glen into it, doing some of the worst acting of my entire life.
“Hey, so, I met Donald Trump a long time ago,” I told him one morning while our daughter was napping. Keep going, Stormy. “I had dinner with him.”
“Did you fuck him?” he shot back.
“Nooooo,” I said, like the idea was preposterous. “I mean, he wanted to, so there might be a way that … anyway.” I dropped it. We were all hanging by a thread. I started doing some magical thinking and decided it was in the realm of possibility that Glen would never see an In Touch magazine. Yeah.
Speaking of, my “friends” at In Touch called again. They said they were excited about the story. “Even though you passed the lie detector test,” said the editor, “we have to do due diligence and see if Mr. Trump wants to comment.”
Well, that would make it real for sure. And I couldn’t very well say, “Oh, God, don’t do that.” That wouldn’t be right. I said I understood. When I hung up, I looked at my baby girl lying on the floor.
“Let’s see how this goes,” I said to her.
*
I was running late for my usual MamaFit class. I had been going religiously, twice a week, for months. It was in a complex of buildings with pre-and postnatal wellness programs. A one-stop shop for birthing ladyparts, with massage, prenatal yoga, mommy-and-me workout classes, and high-end boutiquey things. A lot of doulas and midwives kept offices there. I had found it on Facebook when I asked around for a workout class for new moms.
As I pulled in to the parking lot, I saw this guy walking around. My first thought was, That guy is really hot. He’s someone’s husband. He was looking around, which I took to mean that he was lost in this land of ladies and moms.
I pulled into a space that would leave the passenger side open for me to get my daughter out. I always had her in the backseat on the passenger side, in a rear-facing car seat. I was in a rush, so I got out and ran around the back of the car to get to her. It was really windy, which happens in Vegas, so my hair was blowing in my face as I leaned into the car. My daughter dropped her toy, so I grabbed it and held it in my teeth while I fiddled with her car-seat buckle. I was basically the picture of a frustrated, harried mom.
A man came up behind me. I saw his Converse shoes first. They were navy blue and someone had drawn a star on them. Like a kid, or maybe he doodled. I turned around, taking the toy out of my teeth. It was the hot guy. He was in profile, my side to his. My eyes went up from the cool Converse, and I noticed his jeans looked expensive with a nice wash. He had both hands in his gray hoodie, which also looked expensive, with an asymmetrical zipper at the collar. His hood was down, and by the time I got to the face I was sold. He looked like a cross between Kevin Bacon, Jon Bon Jovi, and Keith Urban. A sharp, angular face like my husband Glen’s, but even better built. He had a very kissable mouth. Like if you were talking to him in a bar, you would be like, “I really just want to touch your lips.”
I thought he was going to ask me how to get to his wife’s Lamaze class. Like, “I’m running late and all of these buildings look alike.” He looked like he belonged to a woman, and nobody in three-hundred-dollar jeans asks you for a dollar. I have seen Vegas crackheads coming up to me. Not this.
“Beautiful little girl you got there,” he said, leaning in to look right at my daughter.
I was readying to say, “Oh, thanks, what building are you looking for?” to save him the trouble of asking me. But he kept going.
“It’d really be a shame if something happened to her mom,” he said, still looking just at her. “Forget the story. Leave Mr. Trump alone.”
He walked away, and it took me a few seconds for his words to even register. His hands stayed in his hoodie pockets. Did he want me to think he had a weapon? I looked around and he was gone. I got my daughter out of the car and I ran inside.
It wasn’t until I was in the elevator that I thought, That guy just threatened to kill me. I stood in the center of the elevator. My face went numb and I couldn’t feel my feet. I began to shake uncontrollably, and I almost dropped the baby.
I got off on the floor, got to the class, and headed straight to the bathroom. I must have looked crazy, because the instructor yelled after me, “Are you okay?”
“She had a blowout,” I said, “be there in a minute.” I was afraid to tell anyone. Alone in the bathroom, I held my baby close, instinctively covering her head as I stared at myself in the mirror. I was shaking still, but less now. Part of me was marveling that someone had just threatened us and dropped Mr. Trump’s name.
Another part of me was just a really mad mom. That motherfucker thought that was a threat? What kind of a bad guy is that? What hit man wears sexy jeans? It just didn’t make any sense to me. If he had looked at all like a threat, I wouldn’t have gotten out of the car, and if I’d caught a bad vibe, I definitely would have closed my daughter’s door to protect her.
“It’s okay,” I told my daughter. I said it again, this time to myself.
I went and did the class, telling no one what happened in the parking lot. I went back to the same coping mechanism I’ve always trusted: keep it moving and solve this on your own. When I left, I walked alongside people, and I scanned the lot before getting in the car. I repeatedly checked the rearview on the way home. People want to know why I didn’t immediately go to the police. If you want to make a police report, it’s public. This is how I imagined it would go:
“Hi, I’d like to make a report about some guy who came up and threatened me.”
“Okay, what did he say?” I picture the cop as genial but by-the-book.
“He said this and this and ‘leave Mr. Trump alone.’”
“Why would someone tell you to leave Mr. Trump alone?”
“Okay, it’s funny. I had sex with Donald Trump and now I’m selling a story, well, someone else was trying to sell my story and I got caught up in it and I know they’ve reached out to Trump for comment and…”
Which would mean the entire world would know, including my husband, who had just tried to throw himself out of a moving fucking car. I was afraid to open a can of worms by telling Glen about the threat. Would he start to get paranoid about me leaving the house? I needed my freedom and, besides, I was used to caring for myself. Listen, if this guy had broken into my house or held me at knifepoint, I would have been like, Fuck it, that outweighs it. I would have gone right to the police. So, I kept it secret.
That seemed like the right decision soon enough, because In Touch disappeared on me. I called the girl who did the interview and she never answered the phone or returned my calls. Same with the editor. When I called Gina to see if she had heard anything, she ghosted me, too. It struck me as bizarre, because Gina was all about getting that money. I gave up contacting them, because part of me was actually relieved. Fifteen grand wasn’t enough money to ruin my life.
And I hadn’t told Glen. He and our daughter were my only concern. I had all the contacts that Gina had talked up as wanting to pay me crazy amounts of money once the In Touch story came out, but I didn’t bother. None of the money seemed worth it. I let it go, content to let Donald Trump recede into the past.
EIGHT
Maybe life was too good.
By the summer of 2015, Glen and I had successfully moved our family to Texas. Glen had stopped drinking and I was transitioning out of being a porn star and becoming known more as a director. My movies are known for having stories and good dialogue, and I would often have guys coming up to me to tell me, “Thank you, your movies are the only ones my wife will watch with me.” I had directed about seventy films by then and was gearing up to shoot my dream project, Wanted, a three-hour epic western I had been planning in my head for eight years. Wanted would win Best Picture and Best Director at the XBIZ Awards and Best Drama at AVN. It was the industry consensus that I was the best female director out there, and when New York magazine profiled me in an article titled “The Female Porn Director Winning All the Awards,”
I got to ask them—and by extension my colleagues—“What does my vagina have to do with directing?”
Outside my film work, I was famous enough that I provided for my family with feature dancer bookings all over the country, but not so known that I was recognized everywhere. Our daughter would soon be going to school, and not a single person in our little neighborhood knew what I did for a living.
Close to my heart, being in Texas meant I could pursue a horse career. I had a new horse I had just imported from Ireland. My horse friends don’t care what I do. I had worked so hard to have the life I wanted.
Then it happened. On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign to make America great again. Seeing Trump on TV jogged people’s memories about all those times he used to call me on sets. I heard from castmates I hadn’t seen in years.
“It will never happen,” I would say. “He doesn’t even want to be president.”
I had a theory that he was a stalking horse for Hillary Clinton, just in the race to make it easier for her to win. It made sense, especially given what I overheard when I was at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the two friends happily discussing their plan. I didn’t put it past either of them. “How does no one remember how much he has donated to her and how much he supported her last time?” I would yell at the news shows. “How are you guys missing this thing?”
As he became less of a joke candidate in the Republican primaries, people started coming out from under their rocks. Good old Gina resurfaced, acting like we had just been chatting a week before.
“You should sell your story now,” she said.
“Why did you ghost me?” I flat-out asked her. “How am I supposed to trust you?”
She told me she had been threatened but didn’t elaborate. She said the magazine was threatened by Trump’s attorney, who she identified as Michael Cohen.
People in the industry called me, each thinking they were the first to suggest that I talk about how friendly he’d once been with a porn star. Brad Armstrong and Jessica Drake at Wicked were pressuring me to come forward because Republicans are seen as bad for the porn business. By then I no longer wanted to kill Jessica. I still didn’t trust her as far as I could throw her, but we could be civil. The things that initially made her my friend were still there: she is a smart businesswoman and committed to her work. Also, once I married Glen and had a child, a fight over some man just seemed childish.
Still, when she showed up on one of my sets one day while I was in L.A., my first reaction was What is this bitch doing here? But that’s mainly because I was directing, and I need complete control of my set.
“Hey, I need to talk to you for a sec,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. This was so strange that I figured it must be really important. We went over to one of the rooms I wasn’t using for fucking.
“I think you need to call this person,” she said, handing me Gloria Allred’s card. “I’ll back you up.”
“No,” I said.
“Just go and talk to her.”
I did, but I decided against coming forward. My life was perfect. I was very happy living incognito as the most accomplished director in the business, one who could also take her daughter to playdates. And on top of that, I still hadn’t told Glen.
*
Trump won Indiana on May 3, 2016. Ted Cruz and John Kasich dropped out, leaving him as the presumptive nominee. If I thought I had faced pressure before, it was nothing compared to what I got from my gay dads—well, my gay dad Keith Munyan and my new gay dad, JD Barrale. Keith and Dean Keefer had split, and it was like my parents getting divorced. They’d been together more than twenty years, so it was a shock. They hadn’t been happy for a while, and I never saw them be affectionate or even call each other honey. While Dean and I remain close, Keith was much more of a focal point in my life.
Keith had been with his fiancé JD Barrale for about five years, and if you ask, one will say that they met in a prayer group to cue up the other.
“Yeah, the Praying-to-Get-Laid group,” the other will say. They have that kind of playful relationship, and it’s sweet to see Keith so happy. Still, you don’t just waltz into my life. I have to haze you a little. When they first got together, I would wait until Keith left the room and I would joke, “I’ve got my eye on you.” As I got more comfortable with JD, we would have a moment and I would say, “You know you’re not my real dad. I don’t have to listen to you.”
I had only recently stopped hazing JD when Trump started to surge. Keith and JD each felt strongly that a Trump presidency would be a threat to them and asked me to do something about it. It was gentle nudging at first. Keith would bring him up and say a quiet, “You could stop him, you know.” I always said the same thing: “I don’t think his supporters would care. It’s no secret he’s a womanizer.”
But they amped up the pressure to come forward once Trump chose Indiana governor Mike Pence as his running mate in July. They called me on speaker from L.A. with a laundry list of things Pence had done to make life difficult for the LGBT community in Indiana.
“This shows what Trump really thinks of us,” said Keith.
“Trump could do away with gay marriage,” added JD.
“I don’t think Trump cares if someone is gay or not,” I told them. “Matter of fact, he probably hopes all the guys start fucking each other so there will be more chicks for him.”
I did understand their concerns about Pence—it’s kind of his thing to pick on gay people and get in their business—but Trump wouldn’t care. I told them I would think about it, but the answer was still no. Besides, I was convinced Trump had no real interest in being president. He would sabotage himself without me having to ruin the lives of the people in my family, thank you.
*
“Are you scared now?”
My friend said it as soon as I sat down. He is a lawyer and a straight shooter, always a good resource as I make business decisions. We had arranged to meet in one of my favorite cafés in Dallas. It was three o’clock and we were the only people in there.
“Why should I be scared?” I asked. It was so hot outside—Dallas in August, no surprise—but the café had the air-conditioning on too high.
“Well, he’s the Republican candidate,” he said. “He’s their guy now. It’s not just him making decisions. And look at what politics have done to other people who knew secrets.”
“What do you mean?”
He leaned forward and started reeling off names of people who died mysteriously. Mary Meyer, Vince Foster … he kept going, but I didn’t really recognize any names until he got to Marilyn Monroe.
“What are you trying to say?” I said. I didn’t put any stock in it and rolled my eyes at him.
“Stormy,” he said, “I’m not fucking around anymore. I’m completely serious.” From the look on his face, I knew he was. This was one of the most sober, reasoned men I know, and he was telling me I was a target.
“If you left here right now,” he continued, “and got in a ‘single-car accident’ or went home tonight and had an overdose…”
“I don’t do drugs,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “No matter what anyone said, there’d be a source in the paper saying, ‘She hid her demons so well.’ If you died tonight, no one would be like, Donald Trump or the Republicans did it. But now you’re their problem. They are going to go through his closet, find his skeletons, and get rid of them. They don’t want to, because they were hoping he wasn’t going to get the nomination because they don’t like him, either. But this is a real thing, Stormy. Think of your family. Because if a natural gas leak happens to make your house explode, there’s no grieving husband on the news, either.”
My daughter’s face flashed in my mind, and I shook the thought away quickly. “What do you think I should do?”
“You have to come forward.”
“There’s that ‘come forward’ thing again,” I said. “Why do people keep saying that? Did you all have
a meeting and decide that’s how to get me to do something?”
“Okay, whatever the choice of words is, the only way to keep your family safe is for your story to be out there. You want it so they can’t blow up your house or cut your brake lines, because everyone would point at them and say, ‘It was you!’”
When I got out and started the car, I first felt the fear that I still have every single time I turn the ignition. I wait for the boom.
I went home and started down a Google rabbit hole of political conspiracies, starting with Marilyn Monroe. If there’s a mistress who died suspiciously, I read about it, and each one, no matter how far-fetched, fed my fears.
I was so serious about going public for safety reasons that at one point I was even scheduled to go on Good Morning America. I was in L.A. to shoot a movie when I told Keith and JD I was going to … dunh dunh dunh … “come forward.” They were thrilled but got scared once I told them I was doing it for my safety. It had become my obsession. Every day this stayed secret, I felt my family was in danger. I lay awake at night. This is gonna be bad, I said to myself, but if the alternative is my house blowing up …
And no, I still hadn’t told Glen.
On October 21, two weeks after the Access Hollywood “grab ’em by the pussy” tape was leaked, Jessica Drake “came forward” in a press conference with Gloria Allred. She said that while we were at the Lake Tahoe golf tournament in 2006, Trump invited her to the penthouse. Jessica stated that she didn’t feel right going alone and that she went with two other women. “When we entered the room, he grabbed each of us tightly in a hug and kissed each one of us without permission.” She also said that Trump invited her back to the penthouse and she was offered ten thousand dollars for sex. She said she declined, saying she had to get back to L.A., and she was offered use of his private jet. At the press conference, she was wearing a Wicked necklace, as well as glasses I had never seen on her before.
The Trump campaign responded, calling the allegation false. “Mr. Trump does not know this person, does not remember this person and would have no interest in ever knowing her.” I wondered what they would say about me.
Full Disclosure Page 18