Stormy Daniels, the adult film actress who alleges that she had an affair with Donald Trump in 2006, said she was threatened for attempting to tell her story publicly and accepted money through a Trump attorney to remain silent because she was scared for her family.
In a much-anticipated 60 Minutes interview, Daniels said she believed she was doing the right thing when she accepted $130,000 from a company linked to Trump attorney Michael Cohen to stay quiet.
The hush agreement allowed her to protect her career and her family, she said, according to a transcript of the show that was broadcast Sunday. And she was concerned about her family's safety after what she described as a scary episode in a Las Vegas parking lot in 2011, shortly after she first tried to sell her story to a tabloid magazine.
Daniels said she was taking her infant daughter out of the car to go to a fitness class when someone approached her.
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"A guy walked up on me and said to me, 'Leave Trump alone. Forget the story,' " Daniels told journalist Anderson Cooper. "And then he leaned around and looked at my daughter and said, 'That's a beautiful little girl. It'd be a shame if something happened to her mom.' And then he was gone."
Daniels said she didn't know the man, and she provided no evidence to back up her claim.
But she said she remained fearful over the years. After The Wall Street Journal reported on the $130,000 payment, Daniels signed what she now describes as a false statement denying the affair. In the 60 Minutes interview, she said she signed the statement under pressure from her former lawyer and business manager.
"They made it sound like I had no choice," she said. While there was not any threat of physical violence at the time, she said, she was worried about other repercussions. "The exact sentence used was, 'They can make your life hell in many different ways,'" Daniels told Cooper.
"They being ..." Cooper said.
"I'm not exactly sure who they were. I believe it to be Michael Cohen," Daniels replied.
She told 60 Minutes that she decided to speak out "because it was very important to me to be able to defend myself."
Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, gave an interview about the alleged affair to the tabloid In Touch in 2011. But that interview -- which allegedly sparked the threat in Las Vegas -- was not published at the time because Cohen threatened to sue, according to 60 Minutes, relying on two former employees of the magazine. In 2016, during the final months of the presidential campaign, she again started talking to media outlets.
Instead of giving another interview, she and her former attorney struck a deal with Trump attorney Cohen, according to the 60 Minutes interview and Daniels' lawsuit seeking to break free of the hush agreement. In late October, just days before the presidential election, she was paid $130,000 in exchange for her silence, the lawsuit says.
Cohen has denied threatening Daniels. Neither Cohen nor his lawyer could be reached immediately for comment. The White House did not respond to a request for comment Sunday.
In the 60 Minutes interview, Daniels described meeting Trump at his Lake Tahoe hotel room during a celebrity golf tournament weekend. When she asked about Melania Trump -- to whom he had been married less than two years and with whom he had an infant son -- he did not want to talk about it, Daniels said.
"He brushed it aside, said, 'Oh yeah, yeah, you know, don't worry about that. We don't even --we have separate rooms and stuff.'"
They spent several hours together over dinner, and he told her that he wanted to get her onto The Apprentice, his reality television show. Then Daniels went to the bathroom, and when she returned, he was sitting on the bed.
"I realized exactly what I'd gotten myself into. And I was like, 'Ugh, here we go,' " Daniels told 60 Minutes.
Though she didn't want to have sex with Trump, she considered the sex consensual. "I was not a victim. I've never said I was a victim," she said.
The 60 Minutes interview also explored the legal implications of the alleged effort to silence Daniels. The payment has become the subject of complaints to the Justice Department and the Federal Election Commission.
Cohen has said that he made the payment without reimbursement, though he has not said what it was for. The government watchdog group Common Cause argues that the payment was intended to influence the 2016 election by silencing Daniels and therefore was an illegal in-kind contribution to Trump's campaign. Cohen has called the Common Cause complaints "baseless."
Michael Avenatti, Daniels' lawyer, disputes the notion that Cohen was working in his personal capacity when he arranged the hush-money agreement.
In the 60 Minutes segment, he said Daniels' former lawyer sent her nondisclosure agreement to Cohen at his Trump Organization office in Trump Tower, and he showed what he said was the Fed Ex confirmation. The cover letter with that document refers to Cohen as executive vice president and special counsel to Donald J. Trump, the Trump Organization.
Information for this article was contributed by Breanne Deppisch and Josh Dawsey of The Washington Post.
A Section on 03/26/2018