Stormy Daniels on Tuesday told jurors her account of a sexual encounter with Donald J. Trump in 2006, an episode that ultimately resulted in the former president’s criminal trial.
Despite the objections of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Justice Juan M. Merchan ruled that it would be up to jurors to decide on the credibility of the porn actress, whose $130,000 hush-money agreement with Mr. Trump before the 2016 election is at the heart of the charges against him. Prosecutors said she would not, however, describe his genitalia, as she did in her book “Full Disclosure.”
Mr. Trump denies they ever had sex.
The fateful meeting of Mr. Trump and Ms. Daniels nearly 18 years ago took place at a celebrity golf tournament on the banks of Lake Tahoe in Nevada. Mr. Trump was competing there, and Ms. Daniels was working at the event to promote a porn studio, Wicked Pictures.
This account is drawn from versions of her story that Ms. Daniels has told in the past. She first described her interactions with Mr. Trump in a 2011 magazine interview. The magazine, Life & Style, agreed to pay her $15,000 for her story, but she never collected because Mr. Trump’s then fixer, Michael D. Cohen — who is now expected to be one of the prosecution’s primary witnesses — had the story killed before publication.
The interview was eventually published in a related publication, In Touch Weekly, in early 2018 after The Wall Street Journal revealed her hush-money deal. She described the episode again in her book, which was published later that year.
Ms. Daniels has said that at the tournament she rode with Mr. Trump in a golf court while he was playing, and he later asked for her phone number and invited her to dinner.
