Stormy Daniels Describes Sexual Encounter With Trump and Is Grilled by His Lawyer

The dramatic decision to call Ms. Daniels to the stand would carry both possible benefits and definite risks for prosecutors for the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg. Her presence would let Mr. Trump’s defense lawyers attack Ms. Daniels as an extortionist and question her credibility.

Still, her testimony will allow jurors to see and hear from the person at the core of the case. Ms. Daniels will also offer context about the environment in which she sold her story of their 2006 encounter, which Mr. Trump denies. She was shopping the story as Mr. Trump’s campaign was reeling in 2016 from the disclosure of a recording on the set of Access Hollywood in which he bragged of groping women.

Michael Bachner, a New York City defense lawyer not involved in the case, said that if prosecutors did not call Ms. Daniels to testify, “it would just be a glaring hole” that the defense would question.

“They have to complete the picture so the jury is not there thinking, ‘What is the government hiding?’” Mr. Bachner said.

Ms. Daniels, 45, was born Stephanie Clifford and raised in Baton Rouge, La. After a long stint in Texas, she moved to Florida and married her fourth husband, Barrett Blade, in 2022. Since her interactions with Mr. Trump gained her international fame, Ms. Daniels has engaged in podcasts, sales of Stormy-themed merchandise, paranormal investigations and ghost-hunting shows, and equestrianism, a pastime she has long pursued.

“I’m a writer, an activist, a stand-up comedian, an actress, a psychic medium, a director, a porn star and a witness for the prosecution against former president Donald Trump,” Ms. Daniels says on the site of an Audible podcast, “Beyond the Norm,” that she has hosted.

In the opening scene of “Stormy,” a documentary about her life in recent years that was released on Peacock in March, she is shown watching the news as Mr. Trump was indicted in New York last year. The film depicts the threats and hateful messages from Mr. Trump’s fans that she received following the disclosure of her hush-money agreement in January 2018, along with the demise of her relationship with her third husband, with whom she has a daughter.

While Ms. Daniels has diversified, she still distributes adult content on OnlyFans, and wrote, directed and starred in “Redemption,” a western-themed pornographic film produced last year that also features Mr. Blade.

She can be sharp-tongued and outspoken and is unlikely to be cowed on the witness stand. Ms. Daniels does frequent battle with critics on social media. On her OnlyFans profile, she calls herself a “troll slayer” and an “all around PAIN IN THE ASS 🖤😏.”

Dean Keefer, a California-based photographer who used to shoot pictures for the cases for Ms. Daniels’s porn movies and became friends with her, believes she would make a compelling witness.

“She’s a good old Louisiana girl,” he said. “She’s a mother. She’s an amazing writer-director. If she just tells her story the way it is, I think she’ll be fine.”

Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer and current nemesis, made the hush-money payment to Ms. Daniels and is now set to be the prosecution’s primary witness. He said in an interview last year on MSNBC that she would “do a fantastic job” if called to testify.

“She’s very quick on her feet,” he said.

Ms. Daniels did not respond to requests for comment about her expected testimony. Her lawyer declined to comment.

In some respects, she will be unable to help the prosecution. She had no direct interactions around the time of the hush-money agreement with Mr. Trump or with Mr. Cohen, who negotiated the deal with her lawyer and made the $130,000 payment from his home equity credit line. Nor can she testify about the plan for Mr. Trump to hide his reimbursements to Mr. Cohen by characterizing them as legal fees.

The cover-up of Mr. Cohen’s reimbursement is the basis for prosecutors’ 34-count felony indictment, which charges Mr. Trump with falsifying his company’s records to conceal a conspiracy to influence the 2016 election.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers contend that he did not know that the checks he signed for Mr. Cohen were not for legal fees, and that Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump’s employees were responsible for any false records. They will be likely to portray Ms. Daniels as someone whose only real connection to Mr. Trump was wanting to be a possible contestant on his reality show. She has suggested Mr. Trump offered her a guest spot at their first meeting, as an enticement to sleep with him.

“Our whole defense, or a lot of our defense in this case, is he was involved with Stormy Daniels over ‘The Apprentice,’” one of his lawyers, Susan Necheles, has told the judge in the case.

There will be unknowns for both sides as they confront one another in court. They have traded vulgarities since the hush-money agreement was revealed. He called her “Horseface” on social media. She compared his penis to a “toadstool” in her book, “Full Disclosure.”

Ms. Daniels was ordered to pay Mr. Trump more than $600,000 in legal fees following a failed defamation suit that her former and now jailed lawyer, Michael Avenatti, filed against him on her behalf in 2018, and subsequent appeals. In a separate case related to her nondisclosure agreement, a judge found Ms. Daniels was owed legal fees and reduced her obligation to Mr. Trump by about $100,000.

She vowed several years ago to go to jail before paying Mr. Trump “a penny.”

How will jurors perceive his reaction to her? Mr. Trump has shown a range of emotions during the trial, closing his eyes during some testimony, sitting tight-lipped at other moments and grimacing at witnesses on occasion.

What will they think of Ms. Daniels? A former stripper, she knows how to command attention. Before Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to federal charges related to the hush-money payment and other crimes, Ms. Daniels swept in to observe one of his hearings in what Vogue.com called “a millennial pink power suit.” Afterward, she addressed reporters about her efforts to get out of the hush-money agreement and speak “the truth.”

Mr. Cohen, at the time, was threatening her with financial penalties for speaking. “He has never thought that the little man, or especially women, and even more, women like me, matter,” Ms. Daniels said. “That ends now.”

There is ample evidence that Ms. Daniels and Mr. Trump knew one another.

She says they met at the booth for her porn label, Wicked Pictures, at a golf tournament in Nevada in July 2006. There is a picture of them together there. He invited her to his hotel suite, she says, and they had sex — after he offered to bring her on “The Apprentice.” He never did.

She does not claim they had sex again, but says they kept in touch for several years. Mr. Trump referred to her as “Honeybunch” when he called, a term overheard on speakerphone by one of her ex-husbands.

Mr. Trump invited her to the January 2007 launch party of his Trump Vodka brand in Los Angeles, and a picture was taken of her there. Two months later, she said in her book, she visited him at his office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower, where he again dangled an appearance on “The Apprentice.”

“I’m still working on your thing, darling,” she quotes him as saying in her book.

There is no direct proof of their sexual encounter, however. Ms. Daniels passed a polygraph test about it before she gave a magazine interview about Mr. Trump in 2011, which was never published. Her ex-husband also took one about overhearing him call her “Honeybunch.” But such tests are not admissible in court.

Mr. Trump’s former assistant, Rhona Graff, after questioning by prosecutors earlier in the trial, said that Ms. Daniels’s phone number was in the list of Mr. Trump’s contacts, and that she had seen her in the reception area of their office.

When Ms. Necheles, Mr. Trump’s lawyer, tried to portray that visit as related to the reality show, Ms. Graff said she assumed that, but did not know.

“You had heard President Trump say that he thought she would be an interesting addition to ‘The Apprentice,’ correct?” Ms. Necheles asked her.

“I can’t recall a specific instance when I heard it,” Ms. Graff responded. “It was part of the office chatter.” She said she could “vaguely recall him say that she was one of the people that may be an interesting contestant on the show.”

Mr. Bachner, the defense lawyer, said that a large part of Mr. Trump’s legal strategy would be to convince jurors that he and Ms. Daniels did not have sex “and that this was basically just a shakedown.”

In cross-examining Keith Davidson, the attorney who represented Ms. Daniels, last week, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers suggested he had a pattern of trying to “extract” payments from celebrities on behalf of his clients.

The defense might attack Ms. Daniels’s repeated failed attempts to sell the story since 2011, and her shifting explanations for trying to sell it.

While Ms. Daniels has insisted she has been telling the truth, she has also at times seemed worn down by what she has said has been a brutal and exhausting period. After Mr. Trump’s indictment, she was asked by Piers Morgan, in a snippet of interview included in the documentary about her, if she believed she would be “completely vindicated” if the case went to trial.

“That’s wishful thinking,” she said.

Ben Protess, Jonah E. Bromwich, William K. Rashbaum and Maggie Haberman contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.