*
The Monday after SNL spoofed me, I got scared when I saw a news story about Common Cause, a nonprofit watchdog group, filing a federal complaint with the Federal Election Commission charging Trump with violating campaign finance laws when he made the $130,000 payment to me eleven days before the election. “The funds were paid for the purpose of influencing the 2016 presidential general election,” they wrote in a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Basically, if it was a contribution to the campaign, it needed to be reported to the FEC. Of course, it wasn’t.
TEN
The Marilyn Monroe suite at the Roosevelt Hotel is one of the most beautiful places to stay in Hollywood. The soft light glints off the white leather of the furniture and the tan wood of the walls, and there are mirrors everywhere—including on the ceiling over the bed—so you can constantly catch yourself doing a Marilyn pose. Her ghost is supposed to still be hanging out there, too. We would have a lot to talk about.
The very nice people at Jimmy Kimmel Live thought it was funny to put me up there for my January 30 appearance on the show. I was scheduled to go on live after Trump’s second State of the Union address. I got in late in the afternoon, and I had invited some friends over, because what good is staying in the freaking Marilyn Monroe suite if you can’t share it?
Gina had called, saying she had clothes for me to wear that night on Kimmel, and also for The View, which she had scheduled me on for later that week in New York. What’s funny is that once you’re famous, people just want to give you free shit. Tonia Ryan had made me the most beautiful dress I have ever worn for the January 27 AVN Awards. It was electric blue and elegant, and made Thunder and Lightning look amazing. Of course, I was excited to get more from her.
My friends were all stuck in traffic, so I was alone when Gina came by with the dress. When she came into the suite, she walked in with a bearded man in a Gucci shirt who I later found out was her boyfriend. And Keith Davidson.
I gave Gina a look, and she knew exactly what I was thinking. “Oh, we just want to talk about possible answers for you to give Jimmy,” she said.
Got it. Media training. Nothing odd about that. Right?
Gina distracted me with literally something shiny—a gorgeous dress in a similar color to the AVN one, but lacy and shorter. And then we sat down at the glass table in the Marilyn suite to talk about what I could say. Gucci guy, who I didn’t know at all, sat next to me. I then learned that Cohen had once again reached out to Davidson.
This should have been my red flag in the moment. Why are Michael Cohen and Keith Davidson always talking?
I was then given yet another statement to sign. I sat up to read it. “The fact of the matter is that each party to this alleged affair denied its existence in 2006, 2011, 2016, 2017, and now again in 2018,” the signed statement read. “I am not denying this affair because I was paid ‘hush money’ as has been reported in overseas-owned tabloids. I am denying this affair because it never happened.”
I panicked. I admit it, I panicked. I didn’t know who the Gucci guy was. Was he the one threatening me? Did he have a gun? Even though I knew the statement was complete bullshit, I picked up the pen and signed my name.
But I purposely signed it wrong. “Stormy Daniels” has a very distinct signature. I have signed my boobs on magazine covers for many years. I signed the statement like it was my first day as a grown-up, girly and bubby. I wanted to signal there was something amiss here.
My girlfriends showed up. I didn’t say a word to them, and if I seemed shaken to them, they probably thought I was uncharacteristically nervous about going on live TV. In no time, Michael Cohen had the statement, and he released it three hours before the show. Thanks, Keith Davidson. Always advocating for his clients, that guy.
Jimmy had a printout of the statement at his desk, and with no tip-off whatsoever from me, he brought up the signature right away on the air.
“This is what fascinates me,” he said. “The signature on your original statement does not match the signature on this statement.” He pulled out a bunch of signed photos he’d found on the internet as examples of my real signature. “Am I getting at anything? Did you sign this letter that was released today?”
“I don’t know, did I?” I said. “That does not look like my signature, does it?”
I was scared to say too much, so I ended up looking like a complete idiot. I couldn’t answer the most basic questions. He had this bit planned where he gave me a Stormy Muppet so I could talk to his Donald Trump Muppet. Jimmy was amazing, and such a class act, but I couldn’t help him. I felt my hands were tied.
Everyone thinks I’m a buffoon, I thought. Jimmy was so understanding and kind. He could tell I’d been railroaded. He took me aside afterward and told me that when I was ready to speak, he could devote the whole show to it. We could change the whole format, even pretaping it and allowing me to see it so I felt more comfortable. “Just tell me when you’re ready,” he said. He also donated to my legal fund and urged others to do the same. It was so odd to have someone genuinely looking out for me, offering to help. He has privately checked in on me, and later, he went on his show to ask viewers to join him in donating to my legal fund. “I never thought giving money to a porn star would be considered an act of patriotism,” he told his audience, “but then again I never thought a guy who got into a Twitter war with Cher would become president.”
That night I went back to my suite and canceled the appearance on The View. It would just be more of me sitting dumbly—humiliated and unable to stand up for myself. Because I wasn’t able to say anything, people could come to their own conclusions and put whatever motives or labels they wanted on me. The Republican Trump fans, weirdly, thought I was great because I was obviously lying to protect the president. The liberals could just write me off as a set of tits with no brain. I could do nothing. My husband was on the couch, my kid couldn’t watch TV, and America—no actually, the whole world—thought I was at worst a liar and at best an idiot.
In the bed, I looked up at the mirror on the ceiling, sighed, and went into a sexy pose to make myself laugh. “Hey, Marilyn,” I said to the empty room. “Feel free to jump in anytime with some advice.”
*
I had a few days off around Valentine’s Day, so I went home to Texas to be with Glen and our daughter. I’d put in a ten-thousand-dollar alarm system to be safe, but this was before I realized that any time paparazzi saw a gap in my schedule, they figured it was worth camping out to get shots of “porn star Stormy Daniels” and her family. The morning of February 13, I was up early sipping coffee in my mug with Elsa from Frozen on it, just checking my messages to see who was calling me a whore that day. You know, just a working mom starting her day.
I nearly spit out my coffee when I saw the Daily Beast headline: TRUMP’S LAWYER MICHAEL COHEN IS SHOPPING A BOOK ABOUT THE FIRST FAMILY, STORMY DANIELS, AND RUSSIA. This fool had the nerve to draw up an NDA saying that Trump and I were supposed to forget each other existed, and now he was pitching publishers using my goddamn name? In his book proposal, with the shitty title Trump Revolution: From The Tower to The White House, Understanding Donald J. Trump, Cohen promised to tell all about his role as a fixer for the family. “No issue was too big, too sticky or too oddball for me to tackle,” Cohen wrote in the proposal, which the Daily Beast said it obtained after it was sent to multiple publishers for consideration. “I saw it all, handled it all. And still do.” The article said Cohen promised to clarify his role in the “unfortunate saga” involving me.
And even the proposal had a threat. “There truly is a method to his madness, to quote that old saw, and people who think otherwise can quickly get buried,” Cohen said. “Steve Bannon comes to mind, but there are plenty of others who are now six feet under due to this basic miscalculation.”
Cohen confirmed the contents of the proposal, telling the Daily Beast, “I have been working on a book and am extremely thankful that it has been well received and sought after by mu
ltiple publishers.”
This dim bulb Cohen was out there selling a book on my name, but I was the only person taking this NDA seriously? I can’t comment, profit, or defend myself?
Right on the heels of that, Cohen announced that he had paid me the $130,000 out of his own pocket. “In a private transaction in 2016, I used my own personal funds to facilitate a payment of $130,000 to Ms. Stephanie Clifford,” he said in a statement to The New York Times. “Neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms. Clifford, and neither reimbursed me for the payment, either directly or indirectly. The payment to Ms. Clifford was lawful, and was not a campaign contribution or a campaign expenditure by anyone.” He concluded, “Just because something isn’t true doesn’t mean that it can’t cause you harm or damage. I will always protect Mr. Trump.”
It was a big day for Cohen flapping his gums. Could he really do this and not invalidate the NDA? I got out the contract and read it again. The last time I’d looked at the NDA was when I signed it in the trunk of a car.
I read every word, including one set of sentences in the second paragraph. It specifically says, “It is an essential element of this Settlement Agreement that the Parties”—Trump and me—“shall never directly or indirectly communicate with each other or attempt to contact their respective families.” “Directly” means I can’t call Trump or Melania and say, “Hey, whatcha wearing?” And he can’t do the same to me or Glen, thank God.
But indirectly? Michael Cohen reached out to me multiple times. There were the two times when he got Davidson to ask me to sign statements, and the one time I initially refused. Then he was shopping a book proposal using my name as a draw, and now he was volunteering to The New York Times that he paid me himself.
All this time, I upheld my end of the contract that I had signed without any negotiation and that I thought Trump had signed as well. I was done being bullied and done being the only one doing what I said I was going to do. I decided they couldn’t intimidate me any longer. I took it and took it again because I thought I was doing the right thing. But what if I was just doing the dumb thing and getting screwed?
They’d repeatedly breached the contract. And I was skeptical about Keith Davidson. I didn’t understand how he and Michael Cohen seemed so chummy, and I worried he was playing both sides. And at the very least, he was a fucking pussy who was incapable of advocating for his client. As a lawyer, if someone approaches you and says, “We want your client to do this,” you either say, “No,” or you say, “What’s in it for my client?” If Michael Cohen kept wanting me to sign more shit, he should have offered me more money. I’m not saying I would have taken it. I’m saying it was never even put on the table or raised as a possibility by Davidson. Also, Davidson would get a huge cut of anything I got. It was a red flag that he never brought any asks to Cohen. But I was afraid to go to another lawyer.
Sure enough, after I approached Davidson with my view that the contract had been breached, he reacted exactly as I suspected he would. He did nothing.
*
The next day, first thing in the morning Valentine’s Day, Gina gave the story to The Blast, an online celebrity news site. The AP got wind of it and published a story with the headline PORN STAR WHO ALLEGED TRUMP AFFAIR: I CAN NOW TELL MY STORY. For me, it was a declaration that I was done getting screwed every which way but well. For Gina, it was maybe an advertisement that my story was up for sale. Gina had all these offers from people, hundreds of thousands of dollars in play, from TV movies to several reality series options. Separately, my assistant Kayla was using several of her connections to broker a reality show deal that would have been incredibly lucrative for me—and yes, for her. They were focused on instant gratification and a lot of money, and I’m not faulting them. In their defense, this looked like a single-news-cycle story. They had no idea the story would become so much bigger than just a payout, with talk of corruption and cover-ups.
I didn’t tell them that I had started to think that I was tired of not being taken seriously. If I went with Jimmy Kimmel and did the show for free, then it would show people I wasn’t a gold digger. I had a job, and you know I’ve never dated any rich dudes. The American Academy of Gold Diggers would not think much of my membership application. “So let’s see, the guy she moved in with when she was seventeen had a mattress and a couple of CD shelves on the floor,” I can imagine a panel judge saying. “And when she moved in with her husband, who it says here she married for—how quaint—love, he had a mattress … and a skateboard.”
If I’m a gold digger, I’m fucking stupid as shit.
That said, I knew how much a money windfall would change the lives of my friends and family. I felt awful. They had the opportunity to make a lot of money, but I decided they couldn’t because of my morals. I know how it looked: What a pretentious bitch. Me on my pornographic high horse over here.
Now, I just needed a decent lawyer to help me tell my story and really advocate for me. I spoke with one who seemed to take the call just for the curiosity factor. He was a very high-powered lawyer, but I just wasn’t getting the sense that he understood what a big deal this was. He dragged it out for a couple of weeks and was moving so slow, I knew he didn’t share my passion, so I ended it. I was anxious that this guy now knew my story and my strategy for confronting Cohen and Trump. After my experience with Davidson, I didn’t exactly trust lawyers.
The next guy was 100 percent on my side and Mr. Gung Ho. “Oh, yeah,” he said, incredulous about what hapless lawyers Davidson and Cohen were. “You totally have a case here.”
“Great, let’s do this,” I said. He was based in L.A., another high-powered lawyer, and we talked on the phone a few more times. It seemed to be going well, so I felt safe sending him a copy of the NDA I signed. We arranged to meet at his office when I was in L.A. for a photo shoot on February 26. I had decided to leave Wicked Pictures after seventeen years and take Keiran Lee up on his offer to make a home at Digital Playground.
Literally two hours before our appointment, when I was finally set to meet him in person, he called to cancel. “I can’t meet you today,” he said.
“You’re kidding,” I said. What was wrong with lawyers? Can’t a girl just take on the most powerful man in the world with a decent lawyer at her side?
“I need you to meet an associate of mine,” he said. “I think he would be a better fit for your case. Where’s your shoot at?”
I told him and he paused. “Oh, a good place to meet is the bar at the Waldorf Astoria in Beverly Hills,” he said. “The lounge in the lobby. He likes it there.”
“Okay,” I said, not trying to hide that I was pissed I was being dumped onto some guy who was probably a junior attorney. “What’s this guy’s name?”
“Michael,” he said. “Michael Avenatti.”
ELEVEN
You know when you look good? I looked good. I went straight from the photo shoot to the Waldorf Astoria in Beverly Hills. I brought my assistant Kayla with me, since I wasn’t sure there wasn’t something fishy going on. Kayla is beautiful, with brown hair and a small streak of lovable crazy. I was angry when I walked in, because I had gone through all these lawyers, and every person I told was another potential leak.
We entered the lobby lounge and stood at the edge. The hotel had just opened the summer before and was done up in a 1920s art deco style, with lots of sleek Gatsby touches like a crystal waterfall chandelier and an ornate fireplace. A man in a suit was standing at the fireplace, his back to us as he sipped a martini.
“That’s probably him,” I said.
He turned his head toward us in a classic leading man move, but he did a double take. Neither of us expected the other to look so good. We had, as they say, a moment.
“Oh, my God, he’s so fucking hot,” Kayla said.
“Be cool,” I said. Let’s just say it: he is gorgeous. He walked right over to us with his hand out, super charming.
“You must be—”
&
nbsp; “Stormy,” I said, extending my hand.
He took it, looking right at me with these ridiculous blue eyes. “Michael Avenatti,” he said.
I jostled Kayla to stop her from staring. “This is my assistant.”
He gestured to a small table with three chairs, and we sat. He ordered another martini, and he did it so suavely that it felt wrong not to get a cocktail, so I went with a vodka cranberry. I would need something to distract me if I had to go through the whole saga and watch my assistant try to eye-fuck this lawyer.
“So,” he said, “tell me what happened.”
I was still mad about being stood up by the other lawyer and saddled with this pretty boy. I barreled through it, telling the whole story brashly because this was going to be one more guy who just wanted to hear about the freak show but wouldn’t actually do anything to help me. I could tell this Avenatti was sizing me up and down, trying to figure out if I was lying or not.
I’m colorful when I speak, and I don’t hold a lot back. I didn’t talk to Avenatti any differently from how I talk to Kayla, or Keith, or anybody else I know.
I saw a crack in his façade as he smiled. Michael now says that’s the moment he fell in love with me as a client. The moment he realized I owned who I was and wasn’t afraid to acknowledge it.
I looked Michael up on Wikipedia that night. “He’s forty-seven,” I told Kayla. “Race car driver on the side.” I saved the photo of him for the caller ID on my phone. I reeled off a bunch of his cases, and Kayla just looked at me like I was speaking dolphin.
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