‘Orange turd’: Porn star’s swipe at Trump

Daniels told Donald Trump’s hush money trial in New York that she wasn’t trying to make money over her claims she had sex with Mr Trump.

“Nobody would ever want to publicly say that,” she said.

Ms Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, is at the centre of the criminal trial against Mr Trump.

She continued her testimony on Thursday (US time).

Mr Trump is accused of covering up payments of $200,000 ($US130,000) linked to an alleged extramarital affair with Ms Daniels, 45, in the run up to the 2016 US Presidential election.

The prosecution is trying to persuade the jury the alleged payments were effectively election interference to cover up revelations that could have been damaging to Mr Trump’s election campaign.

Mr Trump has denied an affair took place and denied the charges.

Along with fixer Michael Cohen, and potentially Mr Trump himself, Ms Daniels is one of the star witnesses.

On Thursday, Trump lawyer Susan Necheles spent much of her time with Ms Daniels arguing her main motivation has been to make money out of her alleged relationship with the ex-President and to suggest to the jury that she hadn’t been honest in her statements about Mr Trump.

“Your words don’t mean what they say, do they?” Ms Necheles said at one point.

In the Lower Manhattan courtroom, Ms Necheles put it to Ms Daniels that she could have given her story to anyone, and indeed was talking to reporters that wouldn’t have paid, but she wanted money.

“You were asking for money, you wanted money from President Trump?”

“No. I was asking to sell my story to publications to get the truth out,” Ms Daniels replied.

The actor added that she wanted to do a press conference but she was “running out of time”.

“So why didn’t you do that,” said Ms Necheles. “Any day of the week you could have given a press conference.”

Ms Daniels said she “chose to be safe,” and wanted a paper trail that would come with a story.

“You chose to make money,” retorted Mr Trump’s lawyer.

Ms Necheles brought up a recent tweet from Ms Daniels and said her intent was to damage Mr Trump and to be “instrumental” in getting him “sent to jail”.

Ms Daniels had replied to a tweet from a random person who said she was a “human toilet” due to her role in the then upcoming hush money trial.

“Exactly! Making me the best person to flush the orange turd down,” Ms Daniels had written in reply.

The porn star and director told the lawyer: “I don’t see instrumental or jail anywhere in that; you’re putting words in my mouth.

“Pretty sure this is hyperbole, if somebody is going to call me a toilet ... I can say I’m going to flush somebody.”

But she did admit that the “orange turd” was indeed Mr Trump.

In another tweet, Ms Daniels had spruiked her “Team Stormy” merchandise as Mr Trump’s legal issues mounted up.

“In celebration of new indictments all orders in next 45 hours get a fee surprise gift”.

Ms Necheles said she was “shilling”.

“Not unlike Mr Trump,” Ms Daniels replied.

Mr Necheles brought up two separate statements where she denied that a relationship had occurred with Mr Trump.

“Rumours that I had received hush money from Donald Trump are completely false,” Ms Daniels had written in 2018.

”Correct, because it wasn’t a rumour, it was the truth,” said Ms Daniels.

The lawyer said that eventually, the adult entertainer wanted to publicly announce that she had had sex with Mr Trump.

“No. Nobody would ever want to publicly say that. I wanted to publicly defend myself”.

Ms Necheles spent a good portion of the cross examination trying to suggest that Ms Daniels had changed her story in various interviews about her meetings with Mr Trump and so her testimony could not be trusted.

Earlier in the testimony, Ms Daniels had said she had starred in around 200 adult films and a directed another 150.

“You have a lot of experience of making phony stories about sex appear to be,” said Ms Necheles.

“Wow,” Ms Daniels vividly mouthed.

“The sex in the films is very much real just like what happened to me in that room.”

“If that story was untrue, I would have written it to be a lot better,” she added.

Ms Necheles also tried to sow doubt about what Ms Daniels claimed was her reaction to her claim that when she was in Mr Trump’s Lake Tahoe suite she was shocked by seeing him in a T-shirt and shorts lying in the bed.

Why, the lawyer asked, would a porn star feel faint upon seeing a semi-naked man on a bed?

“If I came out of the bathroom and saw an older man in his underwear that I wasn’t expecting to see there, yeah,” she said.