The Stormy Daniels I met: a woman’s woman

In 2022, I sat down with Stormy Daniels in the oddest location for an interview I’ve ever encountered. Stormy was working at Exxxotica – a vast expo in Chicago devoted to selling and celebrating porn. So I flew out. Wandering around, waiting for my slot with her, I saw a lot more sex than I wanted, not much of it sexy. Which was appropriate, really. 

I’d come across Stormy a lot over the years. First in 2018, when news about her night with Trump first broke. And then again in the weeks before meeting her when, as research, I trawled through all the coverage again. She almost always appeared as a caricature, not a woman. But the real Stormy, as it quickly became clear, is a complex, compelling conundrum. 

When I think back to that day, it’s always to one particular moment, around half way through our interview. We were sitting in a small, featureless room in her hotel. Stormy had talked about the sexual abuse she suffered aged nine while growing up neglected in a Louisiana neighbourhood gripped by crack addiction. Then she had given her account of her unexpected and unpleasant sexual encounter with Donald Trump in a marble-floored hotel suite, 200 miles and a whole world away in Lake Tahoe. I asked if she needed a brief pause after dredging up such difficult memories. She looked across the table at me, perplexed, suddenly a bit guarded. Insulted, even. 

This is a woman who wears a lot of armour. The boobs (she calls them “Thunder and Lightning”). The peroxide. The strappy black heels. She was closely guarded by men that day: her partner Barrett Blade (whom she married the following year) and another shambolically emo but affable friend.  She doesn’t look like a woman’s woman. The armour does not invite sisterhood or empathy.

But it’s a huge error to mistake that armour for the woman inside. For a start, Stormy has a vulnerability that isn’t obvious from her sarcastic tweets or the details about spanking Trump that she’s shared in court.

She told me about winning a scholarship to vet school. She never went, partly because her adult movie career took off unexpectedly, but she’s kept her acceptance letter, and said she’d recently showed it to her boyfriend. It mattered to her – the evidence, the event, and to have him, me and the world believe that this side of her, the brain above the boobs, exists. 

You wouldn’t want to cross her, but it was clear she was ferociously loyal. She suffered that childhood sexual abuse, she told me, because she stood between a pedophile and a young friend of hers. She said she liked to take care of the people around her, and it rang true.

Stormy is funny and self-effacing, but not immediately relatable. Very few women will identify with the grainier details of her biography, but most have experienced a glimmer, or a highly diluted version, of its major themes.

Many know what it is to have your credibility undermined or belittled because of your gender. Just not perhaps in court. Most know what it’s like to think you’re discussing work – as she says she was with Trump, back in that hotel suite – only to realise with a sinking stomach that the person you’re talking to is thinking of something else entirely. Too many also know what it feels like to find yourself in that grey area between consent and something darker, unable to locate yourself in its gloom or establish the boundaries between right and wrong. 

One of the most controversial parts of Stormy’s evidence has been her suggestion that she “blacked out” during her alleged sex with Trump. She told me about that too. “There’s like 60 seconds,” she said. “I remember him standing there. I remember making a joke. I remember trying to walk around, and the next…”

The gap has been called a gift for the defence, allowing them to question her recall of the event. But does it really undermine her credibility? When I asked why she thought that memory was missing, she said: “I think I just went back to being a nine year-old in that neighbour’s house.” It says more damaging things about misogyny in modern America than it does about the memory of a 45 year-old self-made woman. 

I didn’t leave that interview wanting to be Stormy’s best friend, but I did leave impressed. Because the big difference between Stormy and I, it seemed – bigger than the chasm between our childhoods and professional paths – was that Stormy very clearly felt that she had nothing to lose. Leaving her, in her own words, giving “zero fucks”. 

For that reason if no other, it’s a mistake to write her off. She knows she comes across as a caricature and plays up to it. “I look like the stereotypical porn star… the big boobs and the blue eyes and the blonde hair. And, you know, that’s what those kinds of men really like,” she told me. “That was the role I played… That’s fine.” 

But the real Stormy is more complicated, more interesting, more human: “Do you feel like you’ve been a pawn in a game played by powerful men? Or do you feel like you were able to call the shots?” I asked. “Yes, both,” she said. “Both. Definitely both.”