“My struggle is only just beginning,” Daniels Cohen said in their first conversation, referring to disputes she said were in a holding pattern before Trump left office. “People are really upset and they’re just going to get mad at me.”
Cohen, in line with the title of his program, apologizes for ‘the unnecessary pain’ he went through Daniels when he arranged a $ 130,000 payment during the 2016 presidential campaign to keep her quiet about a alleged challenge to Trump a decade earlier. Trump has denied the case.
“Both of our stories will be forever connected to Donald Trump, but also to each other,” Cohen tells her. “Thank you for giving me a second chance.”
The scandal made Stormy Daniels a household name, and critics accused her of taking advantage of her newfound fame, including touring the country on a “Make America Horny Again” strip tour.
Federal prosecutors have charged Cohen with the rules for contributing to the campaign by arranging the amount for Daniels and a similar payment to Playboy model Karen McDougal. He pleaded guilty to the charges – as well as lying to Congress and tax evasion – and was sentenced to three years in prison.
Cohen produced his podcast from his Manhattan apartment, where he is serving the remainder of his sentence after being released for the second time in July as part of an effort to slow the spread of COVID-19 in federal prisons. The podcast is distributed by PodcastOne of LiveXLive and produced by Audio Up.
Cohen and Daniels are not only united, but also deeply sorry about Trump. Despite the surge in publicity – a windfall with a best-selling book – Daniels said she longed for life before her allegations landed her in the spirit of the times.
“I have to go to places I’ll never go,” she tells Cohen. “But if I could just wave a magic wand and make everything go back as before, I would absolutely do it.”
Daniels said the waning weeks of Trump’s presidency feel like the ‘eye of the storm’. The death threats – and the headlines – diminished as she stayed in a kind of legal limbo.
But now she’s opposed to a ‘second wave’ of controversy, including a defamation lawsuit she brought against Trump, which she took to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Daniels sued Trump over defamation after the then president commented on Twitter that a man who she said threatened her “did not exist”. She filed an appeal against a lower court ruling to dismiss the case and an order to pay Trump nearly $ 300,000 in attorney fees.
The case is under a minefield of legal issues facing Trump after he left the White House, including state investigations in New York over his business dealings.
“I’ve lost everything,” she said, referring to her previous lifestyle, “so I take it completely.”
Daniels also remains a witness in a federal criminal case against her own former lawyer, Michael Avenatti, who is accused of defrauding her of $ 300,000 in proceeds from her 2018 book “Full Disclosure”. Avenatti pleaded not guilty.
The hour-long interview also includes graphic descriptions of Daniels’ sexual encounter with Trump in 2006 – details that she says support the truth of her allegations. She calls the encounter for sure “the worst 90 seconds of my life, because it just made me hate myself.”
While not feeling ‘physically threatened’, she said she did not expect to have sex with Trump, and at one point thought about how to escape from the room and thought, “I can definitely outdo him. . “
She suppressed the details of the rally for years, she said, adding that the dynamics only came into focus after she saw the movie “Bombshell” about the sexual harassment women experience in meetings with the former Fox News CEO. , Roger Ailes.
“I did not say anything for years because I did not remember,” she said.
For Daniels, life after Trump also included a new passion for ghost hunting and a related show, “Spooky Babes,” inspired by the “extreme haunted house” that cheated on her in the Garden District of New Orleans.
“I was in the most intimate way face – to – face with evil,” Daniels said. “Demons no longer scare me.”