Stormy Daniels' Testimony Was Too Graphic for the Judge (and Me)

"I do think there are something things that would have been better left unsaid," Judge Merchan said after Daniels described spanking Donald Trump with a rolled up magazine. Sir...same.

It is only after several hours of dissociating that I feel able to report back on Stormy Daniels’ first day on the witness stand in the Manhattan criminal trial over Donald Trump’s hush money payments to the adult film star. Her testimony about her sex affair with Trump was so salacious and graphic that his defense team requested a mistrial over it, which they probably could have gotten if Trump didn’t consistently hire the least competent people.

Many of the details Daniels shared are ones we’ve heard before in various places, but there was still something jarring about hearing her detail her sex encounters with the former president in a public trial under threat of perjury—while he maintains (notably not yet under threat of perjury) that he never had sex with her at all.

Daniels testified today that she met Trump at a golf tournament in 2006, and when his bodyguard asked her out to dinner with Trump, she replied, “No, with an expletive in front.” Later, at the urging of her own publicist, she met with Trump in his hotel room, where he promptly compared her to Ivanka. “You remind me of my daughter,” Trump allegedly told Daniels (while trying to have sex with her??), noting they’re both blonde and smart and beautiful and “underestimated.” I personally think Ivanka is overestimated, but that’s a blog for another day.

Daniels then recounted spanking Trump with a rolled up magazine “right on the butt,” to which the former president reportedly muttered “bullshit” in the courtroom. She said he told her that he and Melania don’t even sleep in the same bed, that he didn’t use a condom, and that he didn’t seem worried about Melania finding out he was cheating. At one point, the prosecution asked Daniels about the actual sex, and she said, "We were in missionary position for...," before the defense lawyer thankfully objected. The judge sustained the objection, apparently annoyed with the prosecutor’s line of questioning. "The degree of the detail we're going into are just unnecessary," he told Susan Hoffinger.

Later, Trump’s attorneys requested a mistrial over the testimony going where it did. “The guardrails for this witness, answering questions from the government, were just thrown to the side,” Todd Blanche said. And while Judge Merchan agreed that “there are something things that would have been better left unsaid,” he ultimately denied the request for a mistrial because he felt like the defense could have put up guardrails themselves by objecting more while the testimony was happening. “The defense has to take some responsibility for that,” he said.

Indeed, I am a bit confused as to why—in a criminal case that’s specifically about falsifying business records related to this affair—we needed to hear that Trump didn’t wear a condom and was spanked with a magazine and had missionary sex with a porn star who reminded him of his daughter. I don’t blame any of this on Daniels, who was only answering the questions asked of her and has a personal interest in proving that what she’s been saying all along is true. And I assume the prosecution wanted to hear that level of detail from Daniels under threat of perjury to make it clear to the jury that Trump is lying about the affair. But the fact that the defense team let most of these damaging (and frankly gross) details about the Republican Party’s current presidential nominee just roll on out before piping up with their first objection is honestly beyond me.

Daniels will take the stand tomorrow for day two of this shit show, and I will be stocking up on anti-nausea meds in the meantime.

In other news…

• Louisiana’s House of Representatives held a hearing today full of passionate testimony from OBGYNs in hopes of amending the state’s abortion ban to give physicians the ability to treat miscarriages or pregnancy complications with abortions and to allow rape and incest exceptions for children under 17. All three bills failed.

• New York Governor Kathy Hochul now apparently regrets saying that Black kids in the Bronx don’t know what a computer is, and I just want to say I’ve been ready to impeach this woman for some time

• Fox News’ Jesse Waters is openly fantasizing about how hot Trump will look after prison. “Trump is going to come out with a prison body,” the anchor said on his primetime show. “That's what happens when you go to prison, you work out, that's all there is to do.” Eyeballs emoji.