March 31, 2023, 9:42 AM
His name is already associated with the most serious legal process against a former president in the history of the United States.
Stormy Daniels, alias of Stephanie Clifford, is the key to the case for which Donald Trump has been charged this Thursday, thus becoming the first ex-president of his country to face criminal charges.
A grand jury in New York has indicted him for paying during the 2016 presidential campaign to silence Daniels, a former pornographic star who claims to have had an extramarital affair with him.
The exact charges have not yet been made public.
Daniels claims that accepted $130,000 from Trump’s then-lawyerMichael Cohen, before the elections in exchange for his silence.
He former president has always denied having had such an encounter with Daniels since the public allegations surfaced in 2018 and has ensured that the investigation is a “Witch hunt” policy against him by a “corrupt, depraved and armed justice system”.
How the Daniels case began
Daniels spoke for the first time in 2011 about the alleged relationship he had with Trump. She did it in an interview with the magazine In Touch Weekly which was not published at the time.
She claimed she met Trump at a golf tournament in July 2006 and that they once had sex at a hotel in the Lake Tahoe area, a California resort area.
“He didn’t seem concerned about it. He was a bit arrogant,” she said in response to an interviewer’s question about whether Trump had told her not to say anything about the night they allegedly spent together.
If what happened is true, it would have happened four months after the birth of Barron Trump, the son that the former president has with his wife Melania.
Threat Reporting
At the time, the magazine did not publish the interview after threats of legal action from Donald Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, CBS’ 60 Minutes reported at the time.
In Touch Weekly finally brought Daniels’ statements to light in 2018, weeks before the former porn actress told 60 Minutes who had been threatened after the 2011 interview.
The exactriz assured that a man approached her and her little daughter in a parking lot in the city of Las Vegas and told her to “leave Trump alone”.
“She is a beautiful girl. It would be a shame if something happened to her mother”the man would have told him.
Daniels later acknowledged that she accepted a $130,000 “secret payment” from Cohen in exchange for his silence, a month before the 2016 presidential election. She said she did so out of concern for her family’s safety.
Daniels told the show 60 minutes what he was risking a US$1 million fine for breaking the agreement by speaking on television about what happened, but stated: “It is very important for me to be able to defend myself.”
Cohen’s Revelations
Although rumors about the affair began to appear before the 2016 presidential elections, the American daily The Wall Street Journal published an article in January 2018 about Cohen’s hush money payment to Daniels.
Since the payment was made one month before the presidential electionsome sources argued that the money could represent a violation of political campaign rules.
At first, Cohen denied the veracity of the press reports. But in February 2018 he admitted that he had paid Daniels the money out of his own pocket and maintained that neither Trump nor his campaign was involved.
However, in August 2018, Cohen testified under oath that Trump had ordered him to make the secret payment of $130,000 just a few days before the elections.
He presented what he said was evidence of payments he had received from the former president for the money he had given to the actress.
Trump acknowledged that he reimbursed Cohen, which is not illegal, and denied that it had anything to do with the affair with the actress or that there was any irregularity regarding the laws of political campaigns.
Cohen was jailed on multiple charges after pleading guilty to, among other crimes, violating those laws during the 2016 presidential election with his payment to Daniels.
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