Stormy Daniels - Full Disclosure

“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.

“Single?” she asked.

“Separated.”

“Hmmph,” said Kayla.

“I’m not taking on the president to get you laid,” I said.

“Yeah, but if it was an added benefit…” she said.

Since I got to choose where we were going, I thought I’d haze him a little. I told Mr. Waldorf Astoria boy to meet me at an out-of-the-way dive bar I know on Sunset and Hollywood. Kayla, of course, wanted to come along, still desperate to fuck him.

Kayla and I ordered the fish tacos, and Michael said he wasn’t hungry. Getting down to his fighting weight, I guess. And there, in the dive bar, we worked out our strategy.

Back home in Texas, I assigned Michael a specific ringtone so I would know to slip into another room to talk if I was with people, especially my daughter. It was the Bat Signal, and Batgirl here was busy. Michael had called Andy Court, the 60 Minutes producer he had worked with on a story about his lawsuit against medical giant Kimberly-Clark Corporation and its tech firm spin-off Halyard Health. Michael proved they were misleading buyers about the safety of surgical gowns sold during the Ebola crisis. Michael was really proud of winning the case, and if Michael is proud of something, you’re gonna hear about it. The gowns were more porous than the company told people, consistently failing industry standards. After the piece aired, an L.A. jury found Kimberly-Clark and Halyard Health liable for fraud and awarded $454 million in damages.

So Michael vouching for my credibility had some weight at 60 Minutes, but hey, I’m still a porn star. Producer Andy Court and associate producer Evie Salomon had a lot of initial questions they wanted Michael to relay to me. Then, when they brought the potential story to executive producer Jeff Fager, he wanted additional fact-checking before they committed to even investigating the story.

I was impressed that they took it so seriously. I wasn’t offended, mostly because I found it amusing that Michael seemed ever so slightly put off that his assurance, “Guys, she’s cool,” wasn’t enough to get me through the door. So I pulled out my feature dancing calendar for March to see where I could squeeze in 60 Minutes coming to my house in Texas. I wanted Glen there, at least in the beginning of the meeting, because it was important to me that he feel included after I hid so much from him. I was leaving town for a two-night dance booking in Houston on March 2, so I offered March 1.

Michael got to the house an hour before the producers and met Glen for the first time.

I had arranged for my daughter to play at a neighbor’s house during the meeting. She could meet the TV people, but she had to be gone quickly so we could talk. As she did cartwheels in the living room, the car pulled up and Michael opened the door for Andy and Evie. He was a little older, she seemed young and very serious. Glen left after saying a quick hello, making it clear he was not going to be interviewed and wanted no part of any of this.

“I’ll see you later,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, shaking his head as he left.

Normally, if someone came into my home, I would offer a drink. You know I love snacks, and yeah, sometimes I put them out more for me than for the guests, but I at least offer them. But in this situation, they could have a bottle of water and that was it. I didn’t want any appearance that I was trying to influence them or for their opinion to be based on anything other than facts. I wanted to present what I would present on a television interview: the facts. Because I think that’s good enough. I felt about the producers how I felt about the 60 Minutes viewers. I don’t need anyone to like me or to try and change anyone’s opinion of me as a woman or a performer or a slut or a whore. Yes, I wish people would think that porn stars are people, but that wasn’t my agenda for this. These producers could sit in my living room and think I’m a disgusting human being and I deserve to burn in hell, but I wanted them to have to follow that up with “But she never called the president and blackmailed him. She came forward because they called her and wanted her to lie. Her reasoning for the decisions she made is clear.”

I told them the whole story, not wasting a second trying to be charming. They kept asking follow-up questions, sometimes trying to catch me by asking the same question in a different way. It felt like an interrogation, and I just told the truth. My daughter would pop back in every now and again, and we would all stop talking until she left again. They were the first people to hear just about everything, and every once in a while, their stoic faces would crack, unable to avoid a look at each other of This is big.

Michael loved those moments, and every single time, he said, “I told you guys.”

We talked for so long, they almost missed their flight back to New York. They left in a sort of daze, sponges that needed to be wrung out.

That night I went to Houston for my weekend dance booking at Vivid club. On March 3, I met Denver Nicks, who wanted to profile me for Rolling Stone . He had reached out to me on Twitter and I loved his energy. He’s this brilliant guy from Oklahoma who has impeccable grammar and a deep voice that makes everything he says sound important. He got me right away, and I didn’t think of the story as a potential conflict with 60 Minutes, since I assumed the episode would come out before the magazine did. While I was in Houston, Michael called me with an update. The producers must have thought it went well.

We settled on a time later in the month when I had a day free and even asked my makeup artist to hold the date. On March 6, Michael filed suit against President Trump on my behalf, alleging that he had purposefully left his signature off the NDA so he could later “publicly disavow any knowledge of the Hush Agreement and Ms. Clifford.” If Trump—or “David Dennison”—didn’t sign it, the agreement was null and void. I was under no obligation to keep anything confidential.

Maybe the filing got 60 Minutes ticking faster. The morning of March 7, we settled on the next day for the interview in Myrtle Beach, where I had a show.

I looked through my closet, settling on a black pencil skirt and red blouse to keep Thunder and Lightning in check. I didn’t have time to get my makeup artist, because originally I was supposed to go to New York, and Michael assured me they could bring one. They had scouted a hotel with villas where we wouldn’t be recognized and set a call time for 6 A.M.

The night before, I did my 10 P.M. and 1 A.M. shows at Thee Dollhouse. With the meet-and-greet after, I didn’t get back to my hotel until four in the morning. I had two hours before I needed to be at the other hotel for the interview.