Trump Trial Day 14: Stormy Daniels Flushes Trump on Cross
How the adult film actress beat the “Orange Turd” at his own game
The post Trump Trial Day 14: Stormy Daniels Flushes Trump on Cross appeared first on Washington Monthly.
Thursday, Day 14 of the Trump Trial, should have been a good day for the defense, and not just because it had a chance to break Stormy Daniels on cross. I could see from Donald Trump’s less frustrated expression that he liked feeling a little love in the courtroom. When he swaggered out during a break, a young Orthodox Jewish guy, one of six early-rising spectators allowed in the courtroom that day, loudly whispered, “Stay strong!” Trump pointed at him with his closed-mouth smile. The spectator was pulled from the room and tongue-lashed by a court police officer for breaking the strict rules we’ve all learned to abide by.
Senator Rick Scott, the Florida Republican, was in the courtroom for 90 minutes or so, showing his moral support for his constituent, who, under a Florida state law barring felons from voting, will not be able to vote for himself if he is convicted in this case. Scott came to New York to peddle the asinine and ass-backward idea that the real election interference isn’t January 6 but Trump being tried in the New York case.
As Thursday began, Trump’s legal team also had a small tactical advantage. After direct examination, it had all day Wednesday (an off-day) to pore over Stormy Daniels’ direct testimony and pick new holes in it.
When Susan Necheles, a Trump attorney, began her cross on Tuesday afternoon, I immediately sensed that Daniels was actually more effective on cross than on direct—less canned (she has told her story often) and self-justifying, and her oversharing was now under control. On cross, Daniels was combative and cheeky without being defensive. It worked.
Right off the top, Necheles accused the 45-year-old Daniels of “acting in pornography” out of greed. “It’s that simple. You wanted more money, right?” Daniels didn’t miss a beat: “Don’t we all want to make more money in our jobs?” This woman was not going to give an inch.
Then came the argument that Daniels was “out to get” Trump:
Necheles: Am I correct that you hate President Trump?
Daniels: Yes.
Necheles: And you want him to go to jail, right?
Daniels: I want him to be held accountable.
Necheles made a big deal out of Daniels owing Trump $660,000 in legal fees (mostly in interest) stemming from a civil suit that her now-disgraced lawyer, Michael Avenatti, filed on her behalf. She made much of Daniels not having paid the money back despite a court order. Jurors might have had the same thought I did: In March, before this trial began and jurors were instructed not to watch the news, Judge Juan Merchan imposed a gag order on Trump, and the 45th president immediately violated it. Even if they missed that news, were the jurors really going to punish her for failing to pay Trump?
But this revealed the defense’s mindset. Trump’s go-to moves—hypocrisy and projection—turned out to be a big part of Necheles’ cross. She took this approach, no doubt at Trump’s insistence, and it worked against her client.
Necheles introduced into evidence a tweet from Daniels: “I don’t owe him shit and I’ll never give that orange turd a dime.” Daniels stood by that odorous description and would do so again later in her testimony. She said she responded to Trump “because he made fun of me first.”
This playground tussle makes each look squalid and small, of course, but only one is running for president. Daniels’ feisty point that she was just returning fire undermined a good chunk of Necheles’ cross. Trump, just a dozen feet away, could only glare.
Necheles brought up the famous feminist lawyer, Gloria Allred, claiming that the Los Angeles-based attorney wouldn’t represent Daniels despite the two having had a meeting. Necheles said it was because Daniels and Trump never had sex. Daniels responded: “I did not tell her all of the sex details because she basically wanted me to say it was rape.” Given the victims of sexual assault Allred usually represents, this made sense and did nothing to shake Daniels’ story.
Necheles barked up every fruitless tree. She tried to make Daniels out to be a liar over slightly conflicting accounts of whether she left a Mommy and Me workout class in 2011 after being confronted by a menacing figure in the parking lot who threatened her and her daughter if she talked about Trump. Daniels was human and effective: “I lied and said my baby had a blowout, and that’s why I was crying about it in the bathroom.”
As on direct, Daniels’ level of detail—which the judge thought excessive—made her more believable. And when Necheles kept referring to the “supposed threat” posed by the man in the parking lot, I’m not sure she was planting any doubt. At least some jurors must figure that threats like these are issued not just in movies but in real life, and by this time, Daniels didn’t have to accuse anyone in particular for a few of them to assume the guy was a Trump thug.
Necheles, a diminutive 64, is like a super-scary high school principal who is damn well gonna expel you after she finishes her vicious interrogation. She is probably best known in the New York bar for almost winning acquittal in the 1990s of a Gambino family underboss nick-named “Benny Eggs.” She has cross-examined mobster rats, corporate whistleblowers, and other witnesses for nearly 40 years and “pulled a rabbit out of the hat,” as one article put it, for the defense on many occasions.
Today. Necheles scored some points by identifying Daniels’ conflicting accounts of whether the sex happened. But did she get any jurors to move from thinking maybe Daniels exaggerated her story a bit to believing she made it up out of whole cloth? Not likely.
For instance, jurors could conclude that Daniels wanting an embarrassing gossip story about sex with Trump taken down from dirty.com was not the same as denying the incident altogether. Even when she did deny the sexual encounter—both before and after the deal with Trump and Michael Cohen—self-protective denial of having sex is neither uncommon nor that big a deal to most voters. This is a fact of modern politics that helps both Daniels and Trump. The sex only hurts Trump because it goes to his motive for breaking the law to keep Daniels from talking and blowing his chance of winning the presidency.
Picking up on Trump attorney Emil Bove’s more effective cross last week of Daniels’ lawyer Keith Davidson, Necheles leaned heavily into the extortion argument.
“You were looking to extort money from President Trump, right?” Necheles shouted.
“False!” Daniels said indignantly, in a tone that obscured whatever her true motive might have been.
Trump’s essential argument is that Daniels and her lawyer were extorting him with an untrue story, like the one about the love child peddled by Dino the Doorman.
“Your whole story is made up, isn’t it?” Necheles sneered.
“No, none of it is made up,” Daniels replied evenly, giving as good as she got.
The overall impression was of a smart, ambitious woman who would not be intimidated.
The extortionist argument ran aground on the testimony of David Pecker and Keith Davidson, which showed that Cohen and Trump were not innocent victims of some greedy scheme but active players in the louche tabloid world of hush money and lies.
Daniels should have just copped to being a businesswoman instead of getting dodgy and Trumpy (“Deny, deny, deny,” as Hope Hicks often advised.) about being an aggressive capitalist. After endless wrangling, she finally said cutting the deal with Cohen and Trump, then going public, was “a chance to get the story out and to make some money.” She should have said that early and stuck with it.
But the prosecution benefited because Necheles was off her game. On direct, she didn’t object nearly often enough, which the judge would later rebuke her for. Now, on cross, she called author Jeff Toobin “Jeff Daniels” and twice referred to Daniels’ agent, Gina Rodriguez, as “Geena Davis.” Trump was apparently forcing his attorney to slime Daniels on all fronts instead of sensibly pursuing one line of attack. The marching orders weren’t going down well. You could see it on Necheles’ face.
When cross resumed on Thursday morning, Daniels arrived in court dressed better than before. She wore a black robe almost like that of a judge over a modest green dress, and her strappy stiletto heels clicked on the dirty floor. Her hair—now dirty blond—was parted in the middle, and she sported a simple pearl and ruby necklace, apparently made by her teenage daughter.
Like many defense attorneys on cross, Necheles drilled in on perceived inconsistencies. Daniels had occasionally said one thing to one magazine or TV host and another to someone else. Nothing seemed to land.
At one point, Necheles asked questions related to Jacob Weisberg, one of my oldest friends. In the fall of 2016, Jacob—then the editor of Slate—had heard rumors about a sexual relationship between Trump and a porn star. Jacob interviewed Daniels at length and was ready to print the story whenever she put it on the record. “He was my backup,” Daniels testified. “I stopped talking to Weisberg because of the NDA [non-disclosure agreement].” In the end, Trump paid, and Slate, like most reputable publications, has a policy against it. But it was a close call. If Trump had delayed payment even a few days longer, Slate’s story—so close to the election—would almost certainly have spared us Trump’s presidency and everything since.
Besides fishing for inconsistencies, Necheles focused on sex. This was a bad move. By trying to show that Daniels had changed her story about the encounter being consensual, Necheles gave the jury a chance to hear Daniels’ testimony all over again that, while Trump never used physical or verbal force, she “blacked out” and “didn’t remember how she ended up in bed.”
I ran into George Conway during a bathroom break. He was much more damning than on TV: “Literally the worst cross I’ve ever seen.” He thought that, like the cross of Keith Davidson, Necheles should have asked Daniels if she had any knowledge of Trump’s business records, emphasized her “no,” and sat down.
Later, when Trump’s lawyers moved for a mistrial, admission of this prejudicial sexual testimony was their main argument, and although Merchan rejected the motion, they will use it on appeal.
But those appeals will not be heard until after the election. In the meantime, Trump’s lawyers are succeeding in making their client look worse. Trump’s lead attorney, Todd Blanche, understandably told the judge: “You can’t unring that bell.” Good. It seems to me that reversal on appeal—which is hardly assured—is a fair price to pay for getting the jury to hear testimony that helps send Trump into the election as a felon.
To make matters even bleaker for the defense, Necheles may have offended women jurors in particular by trying to shame a stripper and porn star.
Referring to Daniels’ work as a porn screenwriter, she said, “You have a lot of experience in making phony stories about sex appear to be real,” in a tone indicating that she was passing judgment on the witness’s career choices. Daniels responded with a drop-the-mic moment: “The sex in the films is very much real, just like what happened to me in that room.”
This would have been a rough road to tread for a defense attorney any time in the last 30 years, but it was an almost suicidal one today when even prostitutes are carefully referred to as sex workers.
It got worse. You’ve “acted and had sex in over 200 porn movies, right?” Nrcheles said contemptuously. And “there are naked men and naked women having sex in those movies…. But according to you, seeing a man sitting on a bed in a T-shirt and boxers was so upsetting, you became light-headed and almost fainted?”
“Yes,” answered Daniels. “When you’re not expecting a man twice your age, yes.”
It felt as if Trump’s side was arguing that porn stars, like women wearing short skirts, are asking for it. Not a good look to present to a jury in 2024.
The only time I felt Necheles got any traction was when she confronted Daniels on whether she had eaten dinner with Trump or not. In an unpublished interview with In Touch Weekly, the gossip magazine, Daniels said she had talked at length with Trump in the hotel suite “before, during, and after” dinner. But Daniels testified on direct that they hadn’t had dinner. Now, she said she clearly remembered being famished. “I’m very food-motivated, and in all of these interviews, I would have talked about the food” if there had been any.
That was as good as it got for the defense.
Even if the defense had scored more heavily on conflicting accounts of why Daniels denied the story or on Daniels’ dabbling in the paranormal (“You claimed you lived in a haunted house and that a spirit attacked your boyfriend, correct?”), Daniels’ details were so extensive that Necheles’ efforts to portray her as a fantasist went nowhere. At one point, when Necheles accused her of making the whole thing up, Daniels deadpanned, “If [my] story was not true, I would have written it to be a lot better.”
I was pounding away on my laptop, but the reporters on either side of me spotted jurors’ visibly stifling laughs.
There was one moment when I feared that Necheles might blow Daniels out of the water. She began pushing Daniels on the details of the foyer of the hotel penthouse. Here it comes, I thought. Daniels had testified earlier that the foyer had a black-and-white tile floor, and the judge had earlier used the tile floor as an example of her being too detailed. Now, I was sure the defense would produce an exhibit with the décor plan or a photo from Harrah’s in Lake Tahoe proving the floor tile was not black-and-white. Nope. This confirmed that Daniels was indeed in the suite, where the former president, who has denied everything, clearly had his mind on more than conversation.
I lost track of how many times Necheles took a big swing and missed. It seemed as if Trump was using his defense attorney to tarnish Daniels for the kinds of dopey promotions and branding opportunities (Trump Steaks, anyone?) that have defined much of his career; only these were at his expense.
So the jury got to see images of the “Stormy Daniels Political Power Comic Book,” the “Stormy, Saint of Indictments Candle,” and the “Making America Horny Again Tour.” When Necheles expended a huge amount of time on all of Daniels’ efforts to monetize her fame, she replied with a simple and devastating, “Just like Mr. Trump.”
One of the high–or low–points of the day came when Necheles tried to argue—after the introduction of evidence showing Trump had called Daniels “horse face” and a “sleaze bag”—that it was Daniels who was out-of-bounds on social media. She asked, “Isn’t it a fact that you keep posting on social media how you’re going to be instrumental in putting President Trump in jail?”
Twice, Daniels, out-dueling an experienced trial attorney, said, “Show me where I said I would be ‘instrumental in putting President Trump in jail.’”
So Necheles offered on the video monitor a tweet from Daniels describing herself as “the best instrument to flush the orange turd down.”
Daniels said she was merely responding to Trump’s toilet talk.
Necheles then proved Daniels’ point by entering into evidence Trump’s Truth Social post, “Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels a /k/a the human toilet are their star witnesses.”
From my seat, I saw that Daniels was enjoying the exchange, which wasn’t over.
Yes, this is what it has come to in American public life.
Then Necheles dug an even deeper hole for herself: “So when you said you were ‘the best person to flush the orange turd down,’ you weren’t saying you were going to be instrumental in causing him to be convicted of a crime?”
“I am pretty sure this is hyperbole,” Daniels said. “If somebody calls me a ‘toilet,’ I say I can ‘flush’ somebody. See how that works?”
At this point, she gestured directly at Trump and said: “It goes around.”
Yes, what goes around comes around—this time landing in court. Let’s hope it continues doing so, though in a less scatological fashion.
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