![]() ![]() Instead, Avenatti claimed, the story was now about a “coverup” and “thuggish” behavior. Their efforts have been legally “ludicrous,” to quote a word that Clifford’s lawyer, Michael Avenatti, used on “60 Minutes”-in part because Trump never signed the agreement. If it was to keep such details from the “60 Minutes”-watching public that Cohen, with the help of a Trump Organization lawyer, tried to enforce the agreement through arbitration, it wasn’t worth it. (And there have been secondhand reports of even that.) ![]() For example, Clifford said in 2011 that she teased Trump when he showed her a magazine with his picture on the cover on “60 Minutes,” she said that this included a few spanking “swats” with a rolled-up magazine. Most of what is in the “60 Minutes” interview regarding the alleged encounter was in In Touch, including the comparison to Ivanka Trump, with some blanks filled in (but with some of the sexual details in the 2011 interview left out). The Journal story also provoked Bauer to publish the 2011 interview in In Touch. Clifford said, on “60 Minutes,” that she had been happy to remain quiet, “but I’m not O.K. He also suggested that he was trying to stop Clifford from telling a false story. The hush agreement unravelled after the Wall Street Journal ran a story about the payment in January when the paper asked Cohen for comment, he said that the payment was simply a “personal transaction” between him and Clifford. “Because everything that I was afraid of coming out has come out anyway, and guess what: I don’t have a million dollars.” She laughed and, looking at Cooper, added, “You didn’t even buy me breakfast.” “I did not want my family and my child exposed to all the things that she’s being exposed to right now,” Clifford said. She said, on “60 Minutes,” that she knew she could have got a lot more money if she had told the story, but that she preferred not to: among other reasons, her daughter was now old enough to watch television. Less than two weeks before the election, Michael Cohen, the same lawyer who was said to have blocked the fifteen-thousand-dollar story, arranged for a deal in which Clifford would get a hundred and thirty thousand dollars and assurances, from Trump personally, about not suing her under certain circumstances, and in return she would stay silent. Five years after the alleged threat in Vegas, Trump was the Republican nominee for President. The market in information is an unsteady one. (“You remind me of my daughter.”) She said that, on the night they had sex, he had enticed her partly with the prospect of being cast on “The Apprentice”-“You’re going to shock a lot of people: you’re smart, and they won’t know what to expect”-and that he pursued that idea as they spoke on the phone over the next several months. On “60 Minutes,” she remembered Trump being surprised, as they talked, by her intelligence. She has starred in pornographic films, and written and directed them she still performs as an exotic dancer, recently for higher fees. When she imitated Trump’s expression of surprise at something she had said, one got a hint of her gifts as a performer. For her interview, she wore a pink button-up shirt and spoke evenly, with an occasional wry note. And my hands are shaking so much, I was afraid I was gonna-drop her.” She held on to her daughter, and also to her story.Ĭlifford is now thirty-nine years old. “Absolutely,” Clifford said-and that, indeed, is what the parking-lot story, if accurate, sounds like. ![]() “You took it as a direct threat?” Cooper asked. “ ‘It’d be a shame if something happened to her mom.’ And then he was gone.” “And then he leaned around and looked at my daughter and said, ‘That’s a beautiful little girl,’ ” Clifford continued. But that, according to Clifford’s account, did not count as going far enough hence the guy in the Las Vegas parking lot. The magazine held the story and didn’t pay Clifford. Life & Style had offered her fifteen thousand dollars for the story it then called Trump for comment and, in response, two former employees of the magazine told “60 Minutes,” Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen threatened the publication with a lawsuit. Forget the story.” The “story” was one that she had told a few weeks before the day of the fitness class to a writer for Bauer magazines, which owns In Touch and Life & Style, in which she described a sexual encounter that she said had taken place with Donald Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in 2006. Clifford said that she remembered the man saying, “Leave Trump alone. As Stephanie Clifford, known professionally as Stormy Daniels, told the story to Anderson Cooper on “ 60 Minutes” on Sunday night, she was heading into a fitness class in Las Vegas one day in 2011, with her infant daughter in tow-“taking, you know, the seats facing backwards in the back seat, diaper bag, you know, getting all the stuff out”-when a man she didn’t know walked up to her. ![]()
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