Stormy Daniels - Full Disclosure

And guess who her lawyer was on this terrible deal? Say it with me: Keith Davidson. According to her account in The New Yorker , McDougal had a friend, John Crawford, who suggested she talk, and she gave him permission to pursue it after someone started blabbing about it on social media. Like me, she didn’t want someone else profiting off her story and getting the facts wrong. Crawford called someone involved in the adult film industry—let’s go with the alias Deep Throat—who then called Davidson. The New Yorker published excerpts of an August 2016 email exchange that sounded a lot like my interactions with Davidson. When McDougal asked about some of the fine print, he encouraged her to just sign the deal. “If you deny, you are safe” was his reply. “We really do need to get this signed and wrapped up….”

By the way, according to The New Yorker, Karen also got screwed when Crawford, Deep Throat, and Davidson each took their cut, dropping her check by 45 percent. She walked away with just $82,500.

I didn’t vote on Election Day because I couldn’t decide between Clinton and Trump. So, if you think I am some sort of Deep State Clinton operative, I am sorry to disappoint you.

And then the motherfucker won.

That night, when Trump won, my gay dads lost their shit on me.

“How could you do this to us?” JD texted me. “You could have stopped him.”

I disagreed and I stand by it. This is a guy who bragged on tape about assaulting women. Me saying I slept with him would just be another consensual notch on his belt that his fans could pat him on the back about. Look what happened to Karen McDougal: everyone knew she had sex with him and it didn’t make one bit of difference except, well, now everyone knows she had sex with him.

JD was scared that night. He said they were probably not going to be able to get married. “You don’t love us,” he said. Keith, a man who I hadn’t had a single disagreement with in twenty years, chimed in. “You’re dead to us. Don’t ever talk to us again.”

That’s when I started crying. Keith’s words gutted me. They are family to me—and now I truly felt disowned. I put the phone down. I knew they were wrong, but still, some part of me felt I had failed them. I was so afraid of my family paying a price for me talking, and now I’d lost them because of my silence.

For a whole year, everything was calm. Well, as calm as my life ever is. I remember 2017 as pretty damn magical. I had been so stressed about all the Trump stuff that I was able to appreciate the weight being lifted. There is a specific moment I remember from Christmas Eve: We were at home, all of us in our pajamas. My daughter and I made cookies and she left them out for Santa. As I write this, she is still that perfect age of seven, when you are so freaking smart, but you still believe in things. She was so excited, and I looked at Glen.

“What?” he asked.

“I’m happy,” I said, embarrassed at being so cheesy. “Fuck off, I’m happy.”

We all were. Even my gay dads JD and Keith came around. We agreed Election Night was tough, but we were going to leave it behind us.

Then, on January 9, 2018, I got a text from Gina. “There’s some rumblings. Don’t say anything.”

I hadn’t heard from her in an entire year. It was strange, but I figured nothing would come of it. I certainly wasn’t going to say anything. The following morning, I got a call from Keith Davidson. I was not going to talk to him, but he sounded weird in his voice mail.

I later learned that Michael Cohen had called and wanted a statement signed because he claimed the press was all over the story.

I read it and it was pretty soft. It began, “I recently became aware that certain news outlets are alleging that I had a sexual and/or romantic affair with Donald Trump many, many, many years ago.” Well, I wouldn’t call what we had an affair, but I guess that’s not a lie. But I didn’t see any news outlets saying anything. In fact, I was so panicked about a story being out there that I immediately googled every variation of my name and Trump’s that I could think of, scouring the internet and coming up with nothing. What was Cohen even talking about?

The end of the statement was actually kind of cheeky and sounded like me. “If indeed I did have a relationship with Donald Trump,” it read, “trust me, you wouldn’t be reading about it in the news, you would be reading about it in my book.”

I signed it, sent it back. And nothing happened. I had no idea that it was one of my last days of true freedom.

The morning of Friday, January 12, I boarded a plane for New Jersey to talk about a potential movie. Around three that afternoon, all hell broke loose. The Wall Street Journal ’s Michael Rothfeld and Joe Palazzolo, the same reporters who broke Karen McDougal’s story, posted an article headlined TRUMP LAWYER ARRANGED $130,000 PAYMENT FOR ADULT-FILM STAR’S SILENCE. There was a huge picture of me and Trump from the golf tournament. Throughout, they refer to me as Stephanie Clifford—only the IRS calls me that—and refer to sources as “people familiar with the matter.”

They contacted Michael Cohen, who just happened to have the January 10 statement Davidson made me sign saying nothing happened. But it just made me look like a liar, and I couldn’t defend myself at all.

I was trapped. The press was outside my hotel and people were randomly knocking on my door. It was really warm for Jersey in January, sixty degrees and sunny, so people didn’t mind camping out waiting for me. I turned on the TV and everything was “porn star Stormy Daniels” and “pornographic actor Stormy Daniels.”

I called Glen. “Stormy, what the hell is going on?” People had pounded on our front door asking him if his wife slept with Donald Trump. He didn’t know what the hell they were talking about, so he turned on the news and there’s everyone talking about his wife having sex with the president.

“It’s not really true,” I said. “I gave a statement saying it’s not true.” I worried about our daughter. “You cannot have any TV on. It’s all over.”

“Jesus, Stormy,” he said.

I wanted to be home, I wanted to be anywhere but where I was, trapped in a New Jersey hotel with everyone wanting a picture or comment from the porn star. I was alone—no roadie, no assistant, certainly no bodyguard. I got 472 unique text messages the first day and just hid in the hotel. I just hid out for forty-eight hours with no food until a friend finally brought me Chinese food. We sat there in the hotel, eating sweet and sour chicken with brown rice and some awful dumplings. We watched TV until I just had to turn it off.

But my phone kept buzzing. Not one of those 472 messages was from Wicked. How is it that someone could text me, “Hey I curled your hair in 2006, remember me?” but not the people I’d made so much money for? Not even a “What do you want us to say? Our phone is blowing up.” Much less, “How are you? Is there anything you need? How is your family?” Nothing. Keiran Lee from Brazzers, an adult film production company, reached out. I am friends with his wife, Kirsten Price. He told me if I ever left Wicked I would have a home at Brazzers.

Finally, I was able to get home. Glen had a basket of business cards reporters had put under the door when he stopped answering. There was no way I was going to talk.

It got so much worse the next day, when In Touch published my 2011 interview as a cover story. The story had so many details, and it was unmistakably my voice—I could no longer lie to Glen.

We were in our living room at home after our daughter was in bed.

“Yes, it happened,” I told him. “Once. And it was before we met.”