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With Donald Trump convicted on 34 felony counts by a New York jury, commentators and ordinary voters alike are debating what happens next and how (if at all) the verdict will affect the election. In this flurry of argument and speculation, one important aspect of the case risks getting lost: what Trump actually did to Stormy Daniels.
On the stand, Daniels painted a picture of a powerful man who invited her back to his hotel room, offered her a chance to be on his reality show, unexpectedly disrobed while she was in the bathroom, and had sex with her without a condom while his bodyguard waited outside the door. Daniels did not accuse Trump of sexual assault, but she did say she essentially “blacked out” during the encounter and that afterward she could barely put her shoes on because her hands were shaking so hard. His parting words, she testified, were: “Let’s get together again, honey bunch. We were great together.”
What brought her before the court wasn’t that night in 2006. It was what happened next: Through his proxy Michael Cohen, Trump, while he was a presidential candidate, paid Daniels to keep quiet about their encounter. Then he falsified business records to cover up that payment.
Trump pleaded not guilty in the case and has denied having sex with Daniels. “This was a rigged, disgraceful trial,” he told reporters after the verdict was read on Thursday.
But according to Daniels, Trump was not merely a married man cheating on his wife, he was a TV and real-estate tycoon using his celebrity and wealth to maneuver a woman into having sex with him, and then into keeping quiet about it. Remember when the American public used to care about that kind of thing?
Trump’s trial was a reminder of an earlier era in Trump’s political career, when allegations of sexual harassment and assault made by multiple women appeared to threaten his candidacy. The infamous Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump bragged about his ability to grab women “by the pussy,” also briefly seemed like it might derail his campaign.
In the years since, the evidence behind allegations of Trump’s misogyny and sexual violence has only grown stronger, particularly after a jury in 2023 found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation against journalist E. Jean Carroll.
Nonetheless, women’s reports of sexual misconduct by Trump have faded somewhat from public view, as Vox’s Constance Grady noted last year, eclipsed by his three other legal cases, his alleged involvement in the January 6 Capitol riot, and the troubling question of what his election in 2024 would mean for democracy. There’s also a sense of apathy among voters and commentators around Trump’s alleged misdeeds, especially as Trump’s poll numbers have failed to budge even during his felony trial. His famous claim that he could shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and not lose any voters has never seemed more true.
But Daniels’s disturbing account of Trump’s behavior with her is a reminder that his treatment of women still very much deserves the public’s attention.
One of the biggest questions surrounding his potential second term is whether he would move to restrict Americans’ access to abortion and contraception, a question thrown into high relief by the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Knowing how Trump thinks about and treats women can give voters crucial information about how he might approach these issues, which have enormous implications for women’s rights.
Stormy Daniels made clear in her testimony how Donald Trump treated her. A New York jury heard and considered her words. Now it’s time for the American people to do the same.
Stormy Daniels described a frightening sexual encounter with Trump
Trump’s New York trial has been called a “hush money” case in the press (including Vox). That description is an accurate statement of the legal questions in the case, which turned on questions about the $130,000 payment itself. But the shorthand obscures the ugly facts of Trump’s encounter with Daniels.
During the trial, Daniels described that encounter to a jury for the first time, in stark detail that sometimes made even Judge Juan Merchan uncomfortable. It was 2006, and Trump, then 60, had invited Daniels, then a 27-year-old adult film actor, to meet him for dinner at his hotel suite in Lake Tahoe. During their conversation, Daniels said he told her she should be on his TV show, The Apprentice, and to prove to the public that “you are not just a dumb bimbo.”
They talked for about two hours, Daniels said, and then she got up to go to the bathroom, assuming that afterward, she’d make her exit. Instead, she returned to find Trump sitting on the bed, wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt. “I felt the room spin in slow motion,” she told the jury. “I felt the blood basically leave my hands and my feet.”
She tried to walk around him to leave the room, but he stood in her path, saying, “I thought we were getting somewhere,” and, “I thought you were serious about what you wanted. If you ever want to get out of that trailer park —”
“I was offended,” Daniels testified, “because I never lived in a trailer park.”
Though Daniels said she did not feel physically threatened by Trump, she told the court that “there was an imbalance of power for sure.” She testified that she was concerned about the fact that Trump didn’t use a condom; at the time, she performed with Wicked Pictures, the only studio in the porn industry that mandated condom use. During sex, she didn’t say no, she testified, “Because I didn’t say anything at all.”
The testimony was a reminder of Trump’s long history of misogyny and sexual misconduct allegations
The testimony was striking both on its own and for what it recalled: a decades-long history of allegations that Trump used his positions of power to harass and sometimes assault women. There was Jill Harth, who said Trump pushed her against a wall and put a hand up her dress at Mar-a-Lago in 1993. There was reporter Natasha Stoynoff, who said Trump assaulted her in 2005 while she was working on a story about his marriage to Melania. And there was Carroll, who said that Trump raped her in 1995 or 1996 in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room.
In every case, Trump has maintained his innocence, often taking to social media to insult the women accusing him. He said that Carroll was “totally lying” and “not my type.” He called Daniels a “sleazebag” and “horseface” when she went public with her allegations in 2018. “All of these liars will be sued once the election is over,” he threatened in 2016. “Every woman lied when they came forward to hurt my campaign.”
But Trump was also caught on the Access Hollywood tape in 2005 bragging about his ability to grab women: “When you’re a star,” he said, “they let you do it.”
According to an essay published in Slate this week by former Apprentice producer Bill Pruitt, this kind of casual misogyny was par for the course for Trump in his television days. He once ordered a female camera operator off an elevator because “she’s too heavy,” Pruitt writes. He compared another female cameraperson to his daughter, saying “There’s a beautiful woman behind that camera” and “That’s all I want to look at.” He forgot a female contestant’s name, referring to her as the “one with the …” before cupping his hands to his chest, Pruitt writes. Trump’s campaign has denied the account, calling it “a completely fabricated and bullshit story.”
The election and the subsequent rise of the Me Too movement in 2016 and 2017 drew more attention to the allegations of sexual misconduct and misogyny by Trump, who became an exemplar of one of that movement’s central theses: that powerful men routinely use their positions to harass and assault women, and then to get away with it.
But Trump was able to evade any real consequences for the allegations against him — or even his taped comments — for many years. A backlash against Me Too pushed the issue of sexual misconduct out of the public conversation. Today, Trump is leading the presidential race in many polls.
But now that Trump has been convicted by a jury of his peers — a jury who heard Daniels’s testimony about how Trump treated her and, we can assume, believed her — it’s worth revisiting what women have said about him.
As voters try to figure out what Trump would do if elected a second time, they can learn a lot from how he treats the women he encounters — and whether he views them as full and equal human beings or as lesser creatures to be crudely evaluated, used as needed, and then ruthlessly demeaned if they make trouble.
