“What?” he asked.
“I’m happy,” I said, embarrassed at being so cheesy. “Fuck off, I’m happy.”
We all were. Even my gay dads JD and Keith came around. We agreed Election Night was tough, but we were going to leave it behind us.
Then, on January 9, 2018, I got a text from Gina. “There’s some rumblings. Don’t say anything.”
I hadn’t heard from her in an entire year. It was strange, but I figured nothing would come of it. I certainly wasn’t going to say anything. The following morning, I got a call from Keith Davidson. I was not going to talk to him, but he sounded weird in his voice mail.
I later learned that Michael Cohen had called and wanted a statement signed because he claimed the press was all over the story.
I read it and it was pretty soft. It began, “I recently became aware that certain news outlets are alleging that I had a sexual and/or romantic affair with Donald Trump many, many, many years ago.” Well, I wouldn’t call what we had an affair, but I guess that’s not a lie. But I didn’t see any news outlets saying anything. In fact, I was so panicked about a story being out there that I immediately googled every variation of my name and Trump’s that I could think of, scouring the internet and coming up with nothing. What was Cohen even talking about?
The end of the statement was actually kind of cheeky and sounded like me. “If indeed I did have a relationship with Donald Trump,” it read, “trust me, you wouldn’t be reading about it in the news, you would be reading about it in my book.”
I signed it, sent it back. And nothing happened. I had no idea that it was one of my last days of true freedom.
The morning of Friday, January 12, I boarded a plane for New Jersey to talk about a potential movie. Around three that afternoon, all hell broke loose. The Wall Street Journal’s Michael Rothfeld and Joe Palazzolo, the same reporters who broke Karen McDougal’s story, posted an article headlined TRUMP LAWYER ARRANGED $130,000 PAYMENT FOR ADULT-FILM STAR’S SILENCE. There was a huge picture of me and Trump from the golf tournament. Throughout, they refer to me as Stephanie Clifford—only the IRS calls me that—and refer to sources as “people familiar with the matter.”
They contacted Michael Cohen, who just happened to have the January 10 statement Davidson made me sign saying nothing happened. But it just made me look like a liar, and I couldn’t defend myself at all.
I was trapped. The press was outside my hotel and people were randomly knocking on my door. It was really warm for Jersey in January, sixty degrees and sunny, so people didn’t mind camping out waiting for me. I turned on the TV and everything was “porn star Stormy Daniels” and “pornographic actor Stormy Daniels.”
I called Glen. “Stormy, what the hell is going on?” People had pounded on our front door asking him if his wife slept with Donald Trump. He didn’t know what the hell they were talking about, so he turned on the news and there’s everyone talking about his wife having sex with the president.
“It’s not really true,” I said. “I gave a statement saying it’s not true.” I worried about our daughter. “You cannot have any TV on. It’s all over.”
“Jesus, Stormy,” he said.
I wanted to be home, I wanted to be anywhere but where I was, trapped in a New Jersey hotel with everyone wanting a picture or comment from the porn star. I was alone—no roadie, no assistant, certainly no bodyguard. I got 472 unique text messages the first day and just hid in the hotel. I just hid out for forty-eight hours with no food until a friend finally brought me Chinese food. We sat there in the hotel, eating sweet and sour chicken with brown rice and some awful dumplings. We watched TV until I just had to turn it off.
But my phone kept buzzing. Not one of those 472 messages was from Wicked. How is it that someone could text me, “Hey I curled your hair in 2006, remember me?” but not the people I’d made so much money for? Not even a “What do you want us to say? Our phone is blowing up.” Much less, “How are you? Is there anything you need? How is your family?” Nothing. Keiran Lee from Brazzers, an adult film production company, reached out. I am friends with his wife, Kirsten Price. He told me if I ever left Wicked I would have a home at Brazzers.
Finally, I was able to get home. Glen had a basket of business cards reporters had put under the door when he stopped answering. There was no way I was going to talk.
It got so much worse the next day, when In Touch published my 2011 interview as a cover story. The story had so many details, and it was unmistakably my voice—I could no longer lie to Glen.
We were in our living room at home after our daughter was in bed.
“Yes, it happened,” I told him. “Once. And it was before we met.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I found out from some fucker knocking on my door. And then you lied to me. Everyone knew but me!”
“I know,” I said. “I know. But it felt like too much time had passed and I just couldn’t tell you.”
“Is there anything else I need to know?” he screamed. “Why didn’t you trust me?”
“You were going to kill yourself, motherfucker,” I hissed. “I was doing the best I could. I was trying to keep us safe.”
“I could have handled it.”
“No, you couldn’t,” I said. “You have no idea how hard this has been. I was so worried about you. I know if I had told you, you would have succeeded in hurting yourself. I would be blaming myself for the rest of my life.” I brought up our daughter. “For the rest of her life,” I said, “she’d have to live with ‘When my mom told my dad what she did, he killed himself.’”
He said something cruel, which I probably felt like I deserved. I stormed off to our bedroom and closed the door. I waited for him to come in that night, but he didn’t. He spent the night on the couch, where he began to spend pretty much every night. It just became our pattern. Just another change.
To protect our daughter, our TV hasn’t been on for months, unless it’s a DVD or the Disney Channel. We can’t turn on the radio in our car. She knows that I write, direct, and star in movies, but she is too young to know what sex is. I never lie to her, so what she knows is that her mom makes movies that are just for adults, in the way that there are action and horror films that kids can’t watch. When she’s older and we have the sex talk, the very next conversation will be about my work. Trust me, I am far more worried about her reaction to finding out about Santa Claus than about my career.
But I don’t want her finding out from other people. She was set to start a new school in January, but we decided for her safety that we needed to homeschool her. We have a tutor for her now, which is crazy expensive, but I want to make sure she is getting the education she deserves. A first grader, she is already reading at a second-grade level, and she is spot on for math for first grade. And forget history, science, and social skills—she is off the charts. I’m so relieved I am not slowing her down, but there are other costs. Glen took our daughter out for pancakes and a man approached them and told them that her mother is nothing but a whore. I stopped going to Starbucks because the press figured out my routine.
“Hi, Stormy, can we talk for a just a minute?”
“Stormy, is there anything you want to say?”
Our daughter knows who Donald Trump is because he’s the president. We were being followed, and enough people kept approaching me that she wanted to know what was going on. We were in bed, and she was nestled against me, this sweet girl who’s so cool she knows every word to Drowning Pool’s “Bodies” but still wants to cuddle. I decided to level with her, giving her information appropriate to her age.
“Donald Trump did something bad a long time ago when Mommy used to know him,” I said. “People know that I know what he did. And they want to talk to me and get answers about it.”