Revealed: The Truth Behind the Trump-Daniels Scandal

In the fantastical landscape of New York City, there lived a man named Donald Trump. Wealth adorned him, fame embraced him, and Melania, his third and current wife, stood by his side. Yet, whispers suggested that Donald still sought moments of amusement beyond his marital bounds.

The year was 2016 and Trump was having his moment in the sun. He was just weeks away from becoming the President of the United States! However, there was a dark cloud raining on his parade: former adult film actress Stormy Daniels, who Trump allegedly was with in 2006, per CNN.

According to Daniels, she and Trump met during a golf tournament in Nevada in July 2006. He invited her to his penthouse at Harrah’s Lake Tahoe, they talked about her making a guest appearance on ‘The Apprentice’ and they did some things that you can’t do on television.

Image: anniespratt / Unsplash

According to Reuters, Trump told Daniels that he liked her because she reminded him of his daughter Ivanka because both were blonde, smart, beautiful, and underestimated by others.

Daniels affirms that Trump did not coerce her to be with him, but there was some imbalance of power. Among the things she did for him was spanking the former US President with a golf magazine with his own picture on the cover.

Trump denies having an affair with Stormy Daniels, nor having bought her silence just weeks before the presidential elections. According to The New York Times, she tried to sell her story to the press, including The National Inquirer, when it caught the attention of Michael Cohen.

The BBC explains that Cohen, who was Trump’s personal legal counsel for 10 years, had been entrusted the role of paying up women who claimed to have had encounters with Trump to avoid having their stories reaching to the press.

Stormy Daniels was one of these women, who Cohen paid 130,000 US dollars out of his own pocket to be quiet. Though hardly moral, that’s not illegal. The problem came when Cohen tried to get reimbursed.

The BBC writes that Cohen claims that Trump was aware of the whole process and promised to pay him back the money he had given to Daniels and write it off as “legal fees”.

USA Today informs that when the story became public in 2018 by the Wall Street Journal, the big question was if the payment violated the US campaign laws, since it could be seen as a “contribution” aimed at helping Trump in the presidential election.

Meanwhile, political news website The Hill reported that Rudy Giuliani, who replaced Cohen as Trump’s personal lawyer, argued that Trump did make the payment but didn’t know the specifics. Cohen declared himself guilty and served a three-year sentence.

In April 2024, Trump got indicted for 34 charges involving falsifying business records to pay Stormy Daniels, becoming the first former US President to be indicted. All because of Stormy Daniels.

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