Porn Star Stormy Daniels Planned Trump Tell-All In 2016: Report

WASHINGTON, DC — Porn star Stormy Daniels allegedly had a nearly year-long affair with now President Trump more than a decade ago, the online magazine Slate reported Tuesday. The story comes days after a Wall Street Journal report said a Trump Organization lawyer paid Stephanie Clifford, the adult film star’s real name, $130,000 in hush money just before the 2016 presidential election to keep quiet about an alleged sexual encounter.

Slate editor-in-chief Jacob Weisberg wrote in the piece that interviews with the porn star were on the record, but they abruptly stopped about a week before the election. He wrote that he could have published a report without her cooperation, but expected she would disavow it .

Corroborating sources, which Clifford supplied, would likely have done the same, and Weisberg said he wasn’t able to independently verify that a payoff had taken place.

Clifford, the White House and Michael Cohen, the lawyer the Wall Street Journal said made the payment, have denied the newspaper’s account. On Twitter, the entertainer said her encounters with Trump were strictly business and limited to “a few public appearances.”

Trump and Clifford reportedly met at a 2006 celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe. Trump and his third wife, Melania Trump, were married in 2005.

In the Slate account, Weisberg said the porn star confirmed an affair with the then reality television star in a series of phone conversations and text messages between August and October 2016.

“In our conversations, Daniels said she was holding back on the juiciest details, such as her ability to describe things about Trump that only someone who had seen him naked would know,” Weisberg wrote Tuesday.

According to Weisberg’s account, the alleged relationship was consensual, Clifford didn’t allege any abuse and said she was not a victim.

He wrote: “The worst Trump had done, she said, was break promises she’d never believed he would fulfill. She claimed he’d offered to buy her a condo in Tampa, Florida, and that he’d said he wanted to feature her as a contestant in an upcoming season of ‘Celebrity Apprentice.’ Daniels, who is far from naïve, says she did not take him seriously, but Trump had insisted his NBC contract let him do whatever he wanted on the show. Eventually, she said, he’d told her the network wouldn’t allow her on the air because of the objections of an executive’s wife.”

The Wall Street Journal broke the story about the alleged settlement with Clifford on Friday. The alleged payoff took place to stop Daniels from sharing the story on ABC’s “Good Morning America” and Slate, The New York Times reported.

Cohen said in an email to The Times that rumors about a relationship between Trump and the porn star “have circulated time and again since 2011” and that “President Trump once again vehemently denies any such occurrence as has Ms. Daniels.”

In a Jan. 10 statement, Clifford said reports of an affair with Trump were “completely false.”

The White House also released a statement, saying: “These are old, recycled reports, which were published and strongly denied prior to the election.”

On Saturday, The Daily Beast reported that another porn star, Jessica Drake, signed a non-disclosure agreement that prohibits her from even talking about Trump. Drake is one of more than a dozen women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct, also at a 2006 golf outing. She alleged that Trump kissed her without her consent, repeatedly propositioned her, and offered her $10,000 and the use of his private jet to come to his hotel suite.

"His words and actions are a huge testament to his character — that of uncontrollable misogyny, entitlement, and being a sexual assault apologist," Drake said at an October 2016 news conference with her attorney Gloria Allred.

The Trump campaign called the story “totally false and ridiculous,” and said that a photo of Trump and Drake “is one of thousands taken out of respect for people asking to have their pictures taken with Mr. Trump.”

“Mr. Trump does not know this person, does not remember this person and would have no interest in knowing her,” the campaign said at the time.

Drake’s publicist told The Daily Beast that the non-disclosure agreement “blankets any and every mention of Trump, so she’s legally unable to comment.”

“Jessica signed a non-disclosure agreement after her allegations of misconduct, and she can’t do as much as peep his name publicly,” the publicist said.

He later said in a statement supplied by Allerd, Drake’s lawyer, that he misspoke.

“I made an incorrect assumption due to a grave misunderstanding regarding Jessica Drake’s ability to speak or comment about matters relating to President Trump," the second statement to The Daily Beast said. “I have never been told directly, or indirectly, Jessica Drake signed a Non Disclosure Agreement or reached any settlement in regards to any interactions with President Trump. My misunderstanding resulted in incorrect information being provided to The Daily Beast and undue stress to Jessica Drake, for which I am truly sorry.”

Allerd told BuzzFeed News that Drake never signed a non-disclosure agreement with Trump “either before or after he was elected.”

In an op-ed Monday, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote the allegation that Trump’s lawyers silenced Clifford with a payoff has received only cursory attention.

“In any other administration, evidence that the president paid hush money to the star of ‘Good Will Humping’ during the election would be a scandal. In this one it has, so far, elicited a collective shrug.”

In contrast, allegations of sexual impropriety against President Bill Clinton in the 1990s called into question his fitness to serve, Goldberg wrote, recalling William Bennett’s 1998 book, “The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals.”

In it, Bennet wrote that Clinton’s “chronic indiscipline, compulsion, exploitation, the easy betrayal of vow, all suggest something wrong at a deep level — something habitual and beyond control.”

“It is a cosmic irony that, 20 years later, it is conservatives who’ve finally killed off the last remaining unspoken rules about presidential sexual ethics,” Goldberg wrote.

See Also: Stormy Daniels: 5 Things About Porn Star In Trump Payoff Report

Lead photo of Stormy Daniels by Ethan Miller/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images