Stormy Daniels claims on 60 Minutes that Donald Trump threatened her safety while she was holding her infant daughter
Even as the 60 Minutes interview with Donald Trump’s former mistress Stormy Daniels is in the process of airing on the east coast, CBS News has already posted a full transcript of the interview online. Spoiler alert: Daniels does not go into particular details about sex with Trump, beyond asserting that she wasn’t remotely attracted to him, and confirming that they didn’t use a condom. But she did go into detail about the threats made after the fact.
Daniels told this anecdote, which she alleges took place in 2011, just as she was preparing to sell her story to the media: ” I was in a parking lot, going to a fitness class with my infant daughter. Taking, you know, the seats facing backwards in the backseat, diaper bag, you know, gettin’ all the stuff out. And a guy walked up on me and said to me, ‘Leave Trump alone. Forget the story.’ 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.”
Interviewer Anderson Cooper asked if Daniels took it as a direct threat. Daniels replied “Absolutely.” She doesn’t appear to have evidence that the man who threatened her was in fact representing Donald Trump, but she’s making clear that she believes this was the case. She also says she’d recognize the guy if she ever saw him again.
So there you have it: the biggest revelation from the Stormy Daniels interview on 60 Minutes is that she’s alleging Donald Trump and his people threatened the safety of her daughter if she didn’t keep quiet. This paints the subsequent $130,000 payoff in a different light. If Daniels is telling the truth, and there’s no reason to believe she isn’t, then it means that she signed the nondisclosure agreement under threat of physical violence, and that the money wasn’t the motivating factor for her silence. Full transcript here.
