by There was not so much a collective gasp as a synchronized rattle.
Fingers snapped wildly at keyboards as reporters pressed into the hard wooden benches of the 1530 courtroom with painstaking effort every cough, splutter and occasional head shake.
“My clothes and shoes were off. I believe my bra, however, was still on. We were in the missionary position”, Stormy Daniels, the former adult film actress, told the court, describing what she claims was a rather non-passionate night with ex- the president of the United States.
Although Susan Necheles, Donald Trump’s defense lawyer, objected, Ms Daniels continued to reveal lurid details about that alleged night in a palatial hotel room in 2006.
“Was he wearing a condom?” Asked Susan Hoffinger, the prosecutor for the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
“No,” Miss Daniels, 45, replied.
As the sound of Ms. Daniels’ heels clattering across the gray, laminate floor reverberated around the Manhattan courtroom, the relevant but relevant discussions about signing checks and ledgers were replaced by racy details about the adult film industry and Mr. Trump’s bottom line. companies.
Things escalated quickly.
But as the dust settled on a week when the trial suddenly came to life, experts were debating whether Ms Daniels had gone too far.
Over six hours and 10 minutes of testimony, which lasted over two days, both the prosecution and the defense were hammering out revealing details about the alleged night in question.
Some raised eyebrows for Judge Juan Merchan, who expressed disbelief that harsh reports of the alleged sexual encounter were spilling out in his courtroom.
The prosecution argued that the jury needed to hear the details of what happened that night to bolster Ms Daniels’ credibility and show why Mr Trump was so desperate to keep them from being made public days before an election. 2016.
But Randy Zelin, a professor at Cornell Law School, thinks the salacious details, unrelated to the 34 counts of allegedly falsifying business documents, will only damage the case of the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
“To go into graphic and gruesome personal detail… if I’m sitting there as a juror, I’m saying to myself: ‘You don’t have a case’,” he told the Telegraph.
“I’m thinking ‘what you want me to do is hate this guy, just make him dirty and muddy and deny him thinking I’m stupid enough to take the bait accept and convict him because I think he is a person. crazy person’.”
Ms. Daniels leaned back in her maroon, leather chair for six hours or so as she took the jury on a journey from growing up in a “low-income” family in Louisiana to meeting Mr. Trump in the gift room at celebrity golf tournament. in Lake Tahoe.
After accepting an invitation to join Mr Trump, 77, for dinner, sent through Keith Schiller, his bodyguard, Ms Daniels slipped on a pair of strappy gold sandals and made her way to the penthouse suite at a hotel Harrah.
Miss Daniels looked directly at the jury, smiling as if talking to sad friends, as she detailed everything she alleged happened behind that hotel room door.
STI testing, whether actresses have unions and Melania Trump sleeping in a separate bedroom from Melania Trump were all topics of conversation before Ms Daniels “swatted” Mr Trump “on the spot” with a magazine rolled up and facing him, Ms. Daniels demanded.
“Bull—-”, said Mr. Trump, squirming in his chair.
At points, Ms. Daniels appeared to recount non-consensual sex. She “blacked out”, she said, before insisting she was not drugged or threatened. There was an “imbalance of power”.
Describing seeing Mr Trump sitting on the bed in his boxers and t-shirt, Ms Daniels said: “That’s when I had that moment where I felt like the room was spinning in slow motion. I basically felt the blood leave my hands and feet.”
Before their “very brief” sexual encounters, she claimed Mr Trump told her: “I thought we were going somewhere… I thought you were serious about what you wanted. If you ever want to get out of that trailer park.”
Balancing the books?
While the defense may have benefited from evidence that many felt strayed too far, some believe the lengthy cross-examination may have evened the books.
During an intense and sharp cross-examination that lasted several hours, Necheles and Ms. Daniels nodded repeatedly.
Necheles tried to portray Ms Daniels as a greedy rip-off who made up about her alleged affair with Mr Trump to “threaten” him.
In an attempt to use her career as a porn star and director against her, Ms Necheles cited hundreds of “phonetic” films about sex in which Ms Daniels starred or wrote.
“And now you have a story you told about having sex with president Trump, right?” Ms. Necheles asked.
“And if that story was false, I would have written it to be much better”, fired back Ms. Daniels scathingly, prompting laughter in the courtroom, and at least one smile among the jury.
Mitchell Epner, a partner at law firm Kudman Trachten Aloe Posner, believes Ms Necheles’ tunnel vision was a “wonderful gift” for the prosecution in disproving the alleged sex act ever took place.
The former federal prosecutor said it would have been smarter for the defense to cross-examine Mr. Daniels briefly to show that her testimony is irrelevant to the case.
‘Trump is incensed’
He thinks, however, that Ms. Necheles had no choice but to aggressively fight the allegations of whether Ms. Daniels and Mr. Trump had sex that night because that is what her client wanted.
“I know Ms Necheles professionally, she is an extremely skilled criminal litigator. I don’t think that’s the cross-examination she would use if she had another client,” he said.
“I think Trump is angry about this testimony and he wants to win it, and he wants to have it [Daniels] became more important than effective cross-examination in reality.”
Although Miss Daniels and her supernatural instincts don’t know what the jury will decide when it comes to sentencing the first former president of the USA to prison, they will not be short of topics for discussions.
A second star witness in the case, Mr Trump’s former “fixer”, Michael Cohen, is expected to take the stand next week.
When he comes face-to-face with his friend-turned-nemesis Mr. Trump, the convicted lawyer will not spare any details when he accused the Republican front runner of covering up a hush money payment of $ 130,000 to silence Ms. Daniels.
Mr Trump may become chairman again.
