In perhaps her most unlikely interview since she appeared on 60 Minutes to tell the nation about her alleged affair with the president, porn star Stormy Daniels appears in the pages of Vogue’s October issue.
In an interview which was published on the fashion bible’s website on Tuesday, Daniels, 39, talks at length about taking on Trump and Michael Cohen, who paid her $130,000 to keep her claims about their 2006 encounter quiet ahead of the 2016 election.
In an accompanying portrait taken by iconic photographer Annie Leibovitz, she posed in a last season Zac Posen cap mermaid gown that was worth $3,990 but is now being sold online for $850. She was accessorized with Tiffany jewels and had her blonde hair curled and placed to one side.
Speaking of her alleged dalliance with Trump at a Lake Tahoe hotel following a golf tournament in 2006, she joked that it was ‘normal person sex’ which lasted ‘two minutes’ if she is being ‘generous’.
‘How many details can you really give about two minutes?’ she said playfully when asked to describe their alleged tryst.
She left the hotel afterwards without any argument and insisted that she never felt in danger while in Trump’s company.
‘Not once did I ever feel like I was in any sort of physical danger. I’m sure if I would’ve taken off running, he wouldn’t have given chase. And even if I had, there’s no way he could’ve caught me.
‘He’s even less likely to catch me now,’ she said.
She said they began talking because he had a ‘morbid curiosity’ in the porn industry.
‘Businessmen like to talk about business. The questions were good,’ she said.
She went in to the bathroom then emerged and ‘he was in his underwear and his shirt and he was like, “Heeey . . . ’ and I was like…” she said, rolling her eyes.
Afterwards, she and her friends would laugh when he called her because he was ‘just The Apprentice,’ at the time, one of her friends told Vogue.
‘I’d be shooting and she’d call me over from the kitchen and say, “Look who’s calling,’ and we’’ start laughing. Donald Trump? Who cared? He was just The Apprentice then,’ photographer Keith Munyan, one of her close friends, said.
Trump has always denied having sex with Daniels whose real name is Stephanie Clifford. At the time of their alleged encounter, he had been married to the first lady for a year.
Last week, his long serving lawyer flipped on him and admitted paying Daniels $130,000 to keep her allegations to herself ahead of the 2016 election.
Cohen admitted making a similar arrangement with former playmate Karen McDougal.
For months, Trump said he did not know about the payments. In his plea, Cohen claimed the opposite and said he acted under Trump’s instruction.
Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations in doing so, among other criminal charges, and is now facing jail time.
Daniels gloated on Twitter after his plea. She later told Vogue: ‘Michael and I are vindicated, and we look forward to the apologies from the people who claimed we were wrong.’
Her in-person interview was completed months earlier when her fight against the president and his lawyer was still uncertain but others interviewed for it said they all knew about the payment and laughed at Daniels for not taking more money.
‘We made fun of her because she took so little money,’ Kelli Roberts who worked with Daniels in the porn industry, said. Roberts later said Daniels ‘stood out’ from others when she was in charge of porn shoots in the 1990s because she would ‘rent mansions for the day’ and ‘bring bottled water and doughnuts to make the girls feel comfortable.’
Daniel complained that she was living like a ‘fugitive’ with paparazzi camped outside her home in Texas if she ever stayed put for long enough.
‘We’ve been in a couple car chases. We’ve had people put notes under the door, which means they know what hotel I’m in, which means we’ve had to change hotels in the middle of the night,’ she said, referring to herself and her lawyer Michael Avenatti.
‘We’ve been at restaurants when we order food and it’s taken too long or somebody was watching and we’ve had to leave—like that. That’s why I’m so skinny,’ she went on.
Avenatti was also photographed by Leibowitz for the interview. The pair jokingly referred to themselves as Thelma and Louise at one stage.
‘Do you want to be Thelma or Louise, Michael?’ she asked. Avenatti replied: ‘Who’s driving the car?’
Their exchange went on with Daniels asking, ‘Yeah, who decided to go off the cliff?’
When the Vogue writer interjected that it had been Thelma, Avenatti carried on: ‘But was she driving?’
After being told that she wasn’t, he said: ‘I want to be Louise.’ Daniels, at that, said: ‘Which one of us gets Brad Pitt?’
Elsewhere, Avenatti described her as ‘really f****** smart’. After Cohen’s plea last week, he told the magazine in an email: ‘Trump is in a lot of trouble. His habit of disloyalty and stepping on people is about to catch
The interview also happened before Daniels was arrested in Ohio during one of her strip shows. She was accused of inappropriately touching patrons by slapping their faces with her bare breasts. Avenatti fought the charges successfully and they were dropped.
Since she began her Make America Horny Again tour of strip clubs, Daniels said she has been faced with an unexpected outpouring of admiration from women who are pinning their hopes for a ‘revolution’ on her, their unlikely leader.
‘My fan base is completely different. It’s pretty much these packs of women, and they are angry. People come up and they’re so emotional and they put so much on me. They’re like, “You’re going to save the world, you’re a patriot, you’re a hero.”
‘When I started this, I just wanted to save my own a**. Not everybody else’s,’ she said.
She also touched on her estranged relationship from her mother which had been well documented in previous interviews and said her upbringing was ‘neglectful’.
‘I haven’t talked to my mom in over ten years and I haven’t talked to my dad in 22 years,’ she said, adding that she grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, convinced that she had been adopted from a rich family because she felt so out of place with her own relatives.
‘My mom lives in a house that has a boat in the front yard that hasn’t seen water since 1982, and she’s content to just sit there and chain-smoke, and I just couldn’t be like that,’ she said.
She later said: ‘I learned all my early life skills from the strippers at that first club I worked.’
After her Ohio arrest, Daniels’ third husband filed for divorce and asked for full custody of their seven-year-old daughter. In the Vogue interview, she spoke candidly about her child and how much she knows about her battle with the president.
‘She knows that people date and do this and that, and she knows that Trump is somebody I hung out with or knew three years before I even met her dad, so that’s all fine.
‘The problem is they keep using the words, porn star, and she doesn’t know what a porn star is, because she doesn’t know what sex is, and I’m not quite ready to have that conversation,’ she said.
Her daughter has been with her father over the last several months while she tours the country. The pair have limited contact and Daniels must wait for her to call her because the child gets too upset whenever she gets in touch unexpectedly, she said.
‘If I contact her, it makes her sad, so I just kind of have to wait until she wants to talk to me,’ she said.
She was forced to pull her daughter out of school and hire a private tutor when a man tried to take a photograph of her near campus, she said.
Source: The Mail
