“My battle is starting now,” Daniels told Cohen in his first conversation, referring to the litigation she said was on a waiting pattern before Trump stepped down. “People are really upset and will be even more upset with me.”
Cohen, according to her program title, apologizes for the “unnecessary pain” that Daniels went through when he arranged a payment of $ 130,000 during the 2016 presidential campaign to keep her silent about an alleged flirtation with Trump a decade earlier. Trump denied the case.
“Both of our stories will forever be linked to Donald Trump, but also to each other,” Cohen tells her. “Thanks for giving me a second chance.”
The scandal made Stormy Daniels a household name, and critics accused her of capitalizing on her recent fame, including crossing the country on a “Make America Horny Again” strip tour.
Federal prosecutors accused Cohen of circumventing campaign contribution rules by providing the secret payment to Daniels and a payment similar to Playboy model Karen McDougal. He pleaded guilty to these charges – as well as lying to Congress and tax evasion – and was sentenced to three years in federal prison.
Cohen is producing his podcast in his Manhattan apartment, where he is serving the rest of his sentence after being released for the second time in July, as part of an attempt to slow the spread of COVID-19 in federal prisons. The podcast is distributed by LiveXLive’s PodcastOne and produced by Audio Up.
Cohen and Daniels are united not only by infamy, but by deep regret for Trump. Despite the advertising boom – a windfall that included a best-selling book – Daniels said he looks forward to life before his claims throw it at the zeitgeist.
“I have to go to places I would never go,” she tells Cohen. “But in general, if I could just wave a magic wand and get everything back to the way it was before, I would do it for sure.”
Daniels said the last few weeks of the Trump presidency looked like the “eye of the storm”. Death threats – and headlines – have diminished while she remains in a kind of legal limbo.
But now she is gearing up for a “second wave” of controversy, including a defamation case she filed against Trump that she took to the United States Supreme Court.
Daniels sued Trump for defamation after the then president commented on Twitter that a man she said had threatened her was “nonexistent”. She appealed a lower court’s decision to close the case and an order to pay Trump nearly $ 300,000 in attorney fees.
The lawsuit is among a minefield of legal issues that Trump faces after leaving the White House, including state investigations in New York about his business.
“I’ve already lost everything,” she said, referring to her previous way of life, “so I’m taking it all to the end.”
Daniels also remains a witness in a federal criminal case against his own former lawyer, Michael Avenatti, who is accused of cheating with $ 300,000 in revenue from his 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 she said support the truth of her claims. She calls the meeting “the worst 90 seconds of my life, for sure, because it made me hate myself”.
Although she did not feel “physically threatened”, she said she did not expect to have sex with Trump and, at one point, thought about how to escape the room, thinking “I could definitely run away from him”.
She has repressed details of the meeting for years, she said, adding that the dynamic only came into focus after she saw the movie “Bombshell” about sexual harassment that women suffered in meetings with former Fox News executive Roger Ailes.
“I didn’t say anything for years because I didn’t remember,” she said.
For Daniels, life after Trump also included a new passion for ghost hunting and a related program, “Spooky Babes”, inspired by the “extremely haunted” house that plagued her in the New Orleans Garden District.
“I have been face to face with evil in the most intimate way,” said Daniels. “Demons don’t scare me anymore.”