Stormy Daniels, an adult film star and director, got emotional during an interview with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, where she detailed the explicit questions prosecutors asked her during the hush money-election interference trial involving former President Donald Trump.
This special two-hour edition of The Rachel Maddow Show focused extensively on Daniels’ bombshell testimony. Although her infamous description of Trump’s genitalia was excluded from the trial, Daniels shared that she was asked about numerous other explicit details during her interactions with prosecutors.
Daniels recounted how the prosecutors, despite their attempts to be gentle, repeatedly asked her graphic questions to ensure they were thorough and to prepare her for the aggressive defense tactics she might face in court. She described being asked about specific aspects of the encounter, such as whether Trump’s tongue “darted in and out” of her mouth, how he touched her breasts, the feel of his skin, and whether he used a condom. These questions, Daniels explained, were intended to corroborate her account and counter Trump’s denials.
She shared that the questioning process was so detailed and specific that it forced her to remember things she had previously blocked out. For instance, she recalled having to wipe off semen from her leg, a memory that resurfaced due to the probing questions from prosecutors. Daniels admitted that while she has remembered more details over time, there are still parts of the encounter that remain unclear to her.
Throughout the interview, Daniels expressed her distress over the invasive nature of the questions and the emotional toll it took on her. She mentioned feeling unprepared for the defense’s aggressive tactics, particularly how one female defense attorney tried to slut-shame her during the trial. Daniels choked up as she talked about the emotional impact of revisiting these memories, emphasizing the difficulty of remembering and talking about such intimate and traumatic details.
RACHEL MADDOW: And what do you mean? Then again, there’s some objections there that happened between the lawyers and the judge. But what they’re discussing there is whether you are implying that that you had been drugged or that you didn’t– alright.
What you’re really, it seems to me like what you’re really trying to say is there’s parts of the sexual encounter that I don’t remember even now. And, and I was and I asked them out.
STORMY DANIELS: I have to tell you, Rachel, like, and I did write about this in my book when I was going in meetings and prosecutors over and over. And they were nice people. They tried to be gentle with me.
They were asking me the questions over and over, because they wanted to make sure that they were doing their job correctly. They were also probably trying to prepare me for how also the defense was going to be for me. Although no one could have prepared me for how awful that woman was to me and how much she slut-shamed me, or tried to.
They asked me such (chokes up) like horrific specific questions. Like, “did his tongue dart in and out of your mouth?”.
And I don’t even know if you can use some of this. Just cut it out–. “When he was touching your breast, did he, like, flick or roll or your nipples? Like, what did it skin feel like? Can you describe it?”.
Things that would prove, you know, when he said he didn’t use a condom, “well what did you do with the semen?”.
And that made me remember things that I didn’t remember and told that, like, oh, I remember being in the car, going back and then having to wipe it off my leg like, this is the this is the graphic stuff that is not in the testimony that could have been.
As I remembered more of that, it still makes me. It narrows down the window of what I remember, I don’t remember.
There’s still a tiny part that I don’t, and what I have blacked out, I have now started to remember is so terrible. What am I still not remembering?
RACHEL MADDOW: Yeah. Why do you think you have blocked some of it out?
STORMY DANIELS: Everything I just said and just. I just felt her.
RACHEL MADDOW: Your brain essentially protecting you from the memory?
STORMY DANIELS: Yeah, and I thought that there was something wrong with me or like that I didn’t. I didn’t say this stuff because I thought people would say that I was lying or making up.
