That night I went back to my suite and canceled the appearance on The View. It would just be more of me sitting dumbly—humiliated and unable to stand up for myself. Because I wasn’t able to say anything, people could come to their own conclusions and put whatever motives or labels they wanted on me. The Republican Trump fans, weirdly, thought I was great because I was obviously lying to protect the president. The liberals could just write me off as a set of tits with no brain. I could do nothing. My husband was on the couch, my kid couldn’t watch TV, and America—no actually, the whole world—thought I was at worst a liar and at best an idiot.
In the bed, I looked up at the mirror on the ceiling, sighed, and went into a sexy pose to make myself laugh. “Hey, Marilyn,” I said to the empty room. “Feel free to jump in anytime with some advice.”
I had a few days off around Valentine’s Day, so I went home to Texas to be with Glen and our daughter. I’d put in a ten-thousand-dollar alarm system to be safe, but this was before I realized that any time paparazzi saw a gap in my schedule, they figured it was worth camping out to get shots of “porn star Stormy Daniels” and her family. The morning of February 13, I was up early sipping coffee in my mug with Elsa from Frozen on it, just checking my messages to see who was calling me a whore that day. You know, just a working mom starting her day.
I nearly spit out my coffee when I saw the Daily Beast headline: TRUMP’S LAWYER MICHAEL COHEN IS SHOPPING A BOOK ABOUT THE FIRST FAMILY, STORMY DANIELS, AND RUSSIA. This fool had the nerve to draw up an NDA saying that Trump and I were supposed to forget each other existed, and now he was pitching publishers using my goddamn name? In his book proposal, with the shitty title Trump Revolution: From The Tower to The White House, Understanding Donald J. Trump, Cohen promised to tell all about his role as a fixer for the family. “No issue was too big, too sticky or too oddball for me to tackle,” Cohen wrote in the proposal, which the Daily Beast said it obtained after it was sent to multiple publishers for consideration. “I saw it all, handled it all. And still do.” The article said Cohen promised to clarify his role in the “unfortunate saga” involving me.
And even the proposal had a threat. “There truly is a method to his madness, to quote that old saw, and people who think otherwise can quickly get buried,” Cohen said. “Steve Bannon comes to mind, but there are plenty of others who are now six feet under due to this basic miscalculation.”
Cohen confirmed the contents of the proposal, telling the Daily Beast, “I have been working on a book and am extremely thankful that it has been well received and sought after by multiple publishers.”
This dim bulb Cohen was out there selling a book on my name, but I was the only person taking this NDA seriously? I can’t comment, profit, or defend myself?
Right on the heels of that, Cohen announced that he had paid me the $130,000 out of his own pocket. “In a private transaction in 2016, I used my own personal funds to facilitate a payment of $130,000 to Ms. Stephanie Clifford,” he said in a statement to The New York Times. “Neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms. Clifford, and neither reimbursed me for the payment, either directly or indirectly. The payment to Ms. Clifford was lawful, and was not a campaign contribution or a campaign expenditure by anyone.” He concluded, “Just because something isn’t true doesn’t mean that it can’t cause you harm or damage. I will always protect Mr. Trump.”
It was a big day for Cohen flapping his gums. Could he really do this and not invalidate the NDA? I got out the contract and read it again. The last time I’d looked at the NDA was when I signed it in the trunk of a car.
I read every word, including one set of sentences in the second paragraph. It specifically says, “It is an essential element of this Settlement Agreement that the Parties”—Trump and me—“shall never directly or indirectly communicate with each other or attempt to contact their respective families.” “Directly” means I can’t call Trump or Melania and say, “Hey, whatcha wearing?” And he can’t do the same to me or Glen, thank God.
But indirectly? Michael Cohen reached out to me multiple times. There were the two times when he got Davidson to ask me to sign statements, and the one time I initially refused. Then he was shopping a book proposal using my name as a draw, and now he was volunteering to The New York Times that he paid me himself.
All this time, I upheld my end of the contract that I had signed without any negotiation and that I thought Trump had signed as well. I was done being bullied and done being the only one doing what I said I was going to do. I decided they couldn’t intimidate me any longer. I took it and took it again because I thought I was doing the right thing. But what if I was just doing the dumb thing and getting screwed?
They’d repeatedly breached the contract. And I was skeptical about Keith Davidson. I didn’t understand how he and Michael Cohen seemed so chummy, and I worried he was playing both sides. And at the very least, he was a fucking pussy who was incapable of advocating for his client. As a lawyer, if someone approaches you and says, “We want your client to do this,” you either say, “No,” or you say, “What’s in it for my client?” If Michael Cohen kept wanting me to sign more shit, he should have offered me more money. I’m not saying I would have taken it. I’m saying it was never even put on the table or raised as a possibility by Davidson. Also, Davidson would get a huge cut of anything I got. It was a red flag that he never brought any asks to Cohen. But I was afraid to go to another lawyer.
Sure enough, after I approached Davidson with my view that the contract had been breached, he reacted exactly as I suspected he would. He did nothing.
The next day, first thing in the morning Valentine’s Day, Gina gave the story to The Blast, an online celebrity news site. The AP got wind of it and published a story with the headline PORN STAR WHO ALLEGED TRUMP AFFAIR: I CAN NOW TELL MY STORY. For me, it was a declaration that I was done getting screwed every which way but well. For Gina, it was maybe an advertisement that my story was up for sale. Gina had all these offers from people, hundreds of thousands of dollars in play, from TV movies to several reality series options. Separately, my assistant Kayla was using several of her connections to broker a reality show deal that would have been incredibly lucrative for me—and yes, for her. They were focused on instant gratification and a lot of money, and I’m not faulting them. In their defense, this looked like a single-news-cycle story. They had no idea the story would become so much bigger than just a payout, with talk of corruption and cover-ups.
I didn’t tell them that I had started to think that I was tired of not being taken seriously. If I went with Jimmy Kimmel and did the show for free, then it would show people I wasn’t a gold digger. I had a job, and you know I’ve never dated any rich dudes. The American Academy of Gold Diggers would not think much of my membership application. “So let’s see, the guy she moved in with when she was seventeen had a mattress and a couple of CD shelves on the floor,” I can imagine a panel judge saying. “And when she moved in with her husband, who it says here she married for—how quaint—love, he had a mattress… and a skateboard.”