Grown-up film actress Stormy Daniels feared for her safety in October 2016 when she cued a strict non-disclosure agreement with President Donald Trump’s Kings counsel, Daniels told CBS’s “60 Minutes” in an interview that aired Sunday.
Daniels, whose judiciary name is Stephanie Clifford, said her fear stemmed from an dealing she had in 2011, when she was confronted in a parking lot in Las Vegas by a man who told her not to discuss her purported 2006 sexual encounter with Trump.
“Leave Trump matchless. Forget the story,” Daniels said the man told her, before turning to woolly on Daniels’ infant daughter in the back seat. According to Daniels, the man ordered to her, “That’s a beautiful little girl. It’d be a shame if something happened to her mom.”
That interchange was still on Daniels’ mind five years later, in 2016, when Trump fitted the unlikely Republican nominee for president. Through spokespeople, Trump forswears that he had an affair with Daniels.
“Suddenly people are reaching out to me again, oblation me money. Large amounts of money” to tell her story, Daniels asseverated “60 Minutes” correspondent Anderson Cooper.
“Was I tempted? Yes – I struggle with it. And then I get the entreat,” she said. Trump’s attorney, Michael Cohen, was offering to pay Daniels $130,000 to beckon a strict, broad non-disclosure agreement with Trump, according to her.
Understand more: Why special counsel Robert Mueller could care hither the Stormy Daniels saga
“The story [of the alleged affair] was coming out again. I was involved for my family and their safety,” Daniels told Cooper. “I didn’t steady negotiate, I just quickly said yes to this very, you know, rigid contract. And what most people will agree with me extraordinarily low number.”
Daniels’ heavily promoted “60 Minutes” interview is distasteful to alter the course of the scandal already brewing over whether the contract with Daniels, noticed just 11 days before the presidential election, constituted an forbidden campaign donation to the Trump campaign. Daniels also revealed profuse of the details contained in the CBS interview in a 2011 interview Daniels gave In Spot magazine, which was only published in February this year.
But it did raise Daniels’ side of the story into millions of American living lives on a Sunday night, elevating her already considerable fame and adding to the vexations currently facing the Trump White House.
Representatives for Cohen and the Spotless House did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment on the “60 Nows” report.
Daniels has said she and Trump were only intimate positively, in 2006, and she was never sexually attracted to the real estate magnate, who is various than 30 years her senior. At the time of the alleged encounter, Trump’s missus Melania Trump was at home with the couple’s newborn son, Barron Trump, now 12 years old.
So far, Trump himself has stayed mum on the claims, but it’s unclear how long the famously outspoken and pugilistic president can remain shushed as Daniels and her account of their relationship dominate day after day of news coverage.
The dispute of whether or not Cohen made an illegal contribution to the Trump campaign is not the solitary way that the Stormy Daniels saga could continue haunting the Trump Ivory House.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian selection meddling has shined a spotlight on the Trump Organization’s repeated attempts to complete a Trump-branded hotel deal in Russia. Cohen was deeply involved in numerous of these efforts, making him a person of interest to the investigation. If Cohen did ameliorate campaign finance laws when he paid Daniels to stay peace, then theoretically, this could provide Mueller with leverage over with Cohen.
Near the end of the interview, Cooper asked Daniels what she at ones desire say to the president, if he were watching.
“He knows I’m telling the truth,” she said.