Stormy Daniels tells Trump trial of her career as a TV psychic — as it happened

McDougal, a former Playboy model, has said that she had an affair with Trump and was paid $150,000 to remain quiet about it in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election.

Juan Merchan, the judge in the New York trial, has denied a request from Trump’s lawyers to alter a gagging order to allow him to speak about Stormy Daniels.

Merchan says the order is in place owing to the “very real” threat posed by Trump attacking trial witnesses.

“My concern is not just the protection of Ms Daniels, or a witness who has already testified,” he says. “My concern is protecting the integrity of the proceedings.”

Westerhout testifies that Trump was “very upset” when the Stormy Daniels story came out in 2018.

She says that Trump was in regular contact with his former lawyer Michael Cohen around that time.

Westerhout began crying as she was asked about her abrupt departure from her job as Trump’s executive assistant in 2019. She was fired after sharing unauthorised information about the president’s family with a reporter.

During cross-examination, Westerhout said that she wrote a flattering book about Trump after leaving the White House because she felt he was treated unfairly.

“He was a really good boss,” she tells the jury.

The trial has now concluded for the day, with Westerhout due to return to the stand tomorrow.

The jury is shown a contact list that Rhona Graff, Trump’s longtime executive assistant at the Trump Organisation, gave to Westerhout when she started working for Trump at the White House.

The list contained the names of the people with whom Trump spoke most frequently.

They include the tennis star Serena Williams, the former NFL player Tom Brady, Trump’s siblings, Robert Trump and Maryanne Trump Barry, and high-profile media personalities such as Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity.

The full list, according to CNN, is as follows: David Pecker, Bill O’Reilly, Charles Kushner, Matt Calamari, Jack Nicklaus, Tiffany Trump, Joe Scarborough, Nelson Peltz, Phil Ruffin, Lou Rinaldi, Jeanine Pirro, Ike Perlmutter, Robert Trump, Maryanne Trump Barry, Allen Weisselberg, Steve Wynn, Serena Williams, Ari Emanuel, David Friedman, Jerry Falwell, Sean Hannity, Tom Barrack, Tom Brady, Pam Bondi.

Westerhout testifies that Trump brought her on as his White House executive assistant in January 2017. Her desk was just outside Trump’s office.

She says the former president didn’t use a computer or email, and would dictate tweets to her which she would print out for him to check.

“There were certain works he liked to capitalise, like COUNTRY,” she says.

Trump also liked to use exclamation points and the Oxford comma in his Twitter posts, she adds.

The only other person with access to Trump’s social media accounts was Dan Scavino, a longtime Trump aide who served as his White House deputy chief of staff.

During the lunchbreak, Trump renewed his attacks on the trial judge in posts to Truth Social.

“This Judge has taken away my Constitutional Right to FREE SPEECH. I am the only Presidential Candidate in History to be GAGGED,” the former president wrote.

“THIS ISN’T A TRIAL, IT’S A POLITICAL CAMPAIGN, A WITCH HUNT, JUST LIKE THE HIGHLY CONFLICTED AND BIASED JUDGE, JUAN MERCHAN, WANTED IT TO BE,” he wrote in a separate post.

Judge Juan Merchan has found Trump in contempt of court for ten separate violations of a court order that bans him from talking about witnesses and jurors, and warned him that he faces jail time for any further breaches. Under the terms of the order, Trump is allowed to comment on the judge himself.

• Who is Judge Juan Merchan?

Madeleine Westerhout outlines her professional background, telling the jury she worked for the Republican National Committee (RNC) between 2013 and 2017.

She was at the RNC when the infamous Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump spoke about sexual assault, was made public weeks before the 2016 election.

Westerhout testifies that she remembers the tape “rattling RNC leadership”. The RNC had conversations about how it would be possible to replace Trump as the Republican candidate “if it came to that”, according to the Associated Press.

Tracey Menzies, of HarperCollins, was asked to read excerpts from Trump’s 2007 book Think Big: Make it Happen in Business and Life.

The passages focus on how Trump prized loyalty above all else.

“I just can’t stomach disloyalty. I put the people who are loyal to me on a high pedestal and take care of them very well,” one excerpt shown to the jury reads. “I go out of my way for the people who were loyal to me in bad times.”

Menzies explains that some parts of the book were written by Trump, others by a ghostwriter.

During a very quick cross-examination, Menzies explains that the book covers are designed to generate sales.

She has now been excused, and the next witness is Madeleine Westerhout, the former director of Oval Office Operations.

Rebecca Manochio’s brief stay on the witness stand has concluded.

The Trump Organisation’s bookkeeper testified that her duties included handling Trump’s personal expenses and sending cheques to the White House for his signature.

The next witness to be called is Tracey Menzies, a senior vice president of production and creative operations at the book publisher HarperCollins.

Trump re-entered the courtroom a short time ago, and again raised his fist and ignored questions shouted to him by reporters.

During the lunch break he went on a posting spree to his Truth Social account. In ten rapid-fire posts, he attacked Judge Merchan, the hush money trial and President Biden, and lauded his latest presidential poll numbers.

Before lunch, Stormy Daniels was asked about the American Century Championship golf tournament at Lake Tahoe, where she met Trump in 2006.

“At the golf tournament, President Trump was probably the biggest celebrity?” Necheles asked.

“He did very well at that golf tournament, right?”

Daniels couldn’t recall how Trump had fared. It turns out that Trump came 62nd in a field of 80 at the pro-am tournament at Edgewood Tahoe Golf Course.

Others to compete in the tournament were Charles Barkley, the former NBA player, Dan Quayle, who served as vice president from 1989 to 1993 under George Bush, and Aaron Woods, the NFL quarterback.

Trump did not face or acknowledge the media pool as he left the courtroom for the lunch break. Reporters asked him “What did you tell oil executives?” and “How do you think your lawyers did crossing Stormy?”.

The first question relates to a Washington Post report that Trump asked oil executives for $1 billion in return for allowing them to increase oil drilling and reverse dozens of Biden administration environmental policies. Trump is said to have made the pitch to 20 top US oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago residence last month.

Clark Brewster, Stormy Daniels’s lawyer, has praised his client in a post on Twitter/X after her testimony concluded on Thursday.

Prosecutors are using Rebecca Manochio’s appearance in the witness stand to enter Trump Organisation records into evidence.

These include emails and invoices she sent to the White House after Donald Trump became president.

The trial has just taken a lunch break. Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche has raised three issues that he wants the judge to rule on: another motion for a mistrial; an order to prevent Karen McDougal, the former Playboy model, from testifying; and the gag order as it relates to Stormy Daniels.

The judge, Juan Merchan, says he will rule on the issues after the jury is excused later this afternoon.

Stormy Daniels was a combative witness under intense cross-examination from the defence lawyer Susan Necheles. She pushed back strongly on claims that she had made up the alleged sexual encounter with Trump and that she had been motivated by money to speak out.

In a rare moment of vulnerability on the stand, Daniels said that she had said that she felt faint and confused during the alleged encounter with Trump owing to her own insecurities. On Tuesday she told prosecutors that she had felt there was an “imbalance of power”.

Daniels was asked about a supernatural TV show she appeared in called Spooky Babes, and about her claims to be a medium who could speak to the dead. The defence’s strategy was to undermine her credibility in jurors’ minds. She insisted that the show was purely entertainment.

The porn star was asked about inconsistencies in her accounts over the years of her meeting with Trump. At one point Necheles read aloud from a statement that Daniels signed in 2018 denying “rumours” of an affair. Daniels said that her lawyer had told her to sign the statement to protect the terms of her non-disclosure agreement.

Daniels admitted that she didn’t really understand the charges against Trump of falsifying bank records to conceal the $130,000 payment made to her prior to the 2016 election. She said she was simply there to answer questions.

After more than six hours of testimony, Stormy Daniels has now been excused from the witness stand.

In her final responses to the prosecutor, she insisted that she had been telling the truth throughout her questioning.

She said that although she had benefited financially from talking publicly about the alleged affair, she had also had to hire additional security and move home to protect her and her daughter.

As she stepped out of the witness stand, she thanked the judge, Juan Merchan.

The next witness will be Rebecca Manochio, a junior bookkeeper at the Trump Organisation.

• Jane Mulkerrins: She made jokes like the Stormy Daniels I know — but this was dark

Stormy Daniels is asked about celebrating the prospect of Donald Trump going to prison after he was indicted for the hush money payments.

She says that it was in response to being called a “disgusting prostitute” by Trump.

Daniels testifies that she felt directly threatened by an August 2023 Truth Social post by the former president, which read: “If you go after me, I’m coming after you!”

Susan Hoffinger, for the prosecution, begins her redirect questioning by asking Stormy Daniels about her motivations for signing the non-disclosure agreement.

Daniels recalls a piece of advice she received about how it was safer to hide in plain view, and to “get high, stay high”.

“It just means that if you’re out in the open, you’re safer,” she said, according to a CNN reporter inside the courtroom.

Daniels previously testified that she was threatened to stay quiet about the alleged affair with Trump by an unknown man in a Las Vegas parking garage in 2011.

Under questioning from the defence lawyer Susan Necheles, Daniels concedes that she doesn’t really understand what Donald Trump has been charged with.

“I’m just here to answer the question asked to me,” she says, according to CNN.

Daniels goes on to say that she doesn’t know anything about Trump’s business records.

Necheles then wraps up her cross-examination, which has lasted 30 minutes longer than the prosecution’s direct questioning.

Trump is facing 34 felony charges related to a $130,000 payment that Michael Cohen, his former lawyer and fixer, made to Daniels to suppress her claims of a sexual encounter with Trump from becoming public on the eve of the 2016 presidential race.

The cross-examination has resumed, with the defence lawyer Susan Necheles asking a series of questions about the 2006 encounter between the porn star Stormy Daniels and Donald Trump at a Lake Tahoe golf tournament.

They appear deliberately tailored towards pleasing her client.

“At the golf tournament, President Trump was probably the biggest celebrity?” Necheles asks.

Daniels replies that people recognised her too.

“He did very well at that golf tournament, right?” Necheles then asks.

Daniels replies that she doesn’t remember.

The trial is on a morning break, and as he left the courtroom Trump raised his left fist and pumped it in the direction of media waiting in the hallway. He did not respond to reporter’s questions.

Daniels has now been on the witness stand for roughly five and a half hours.

After spending much of the morning seeking to undermine the witness, Trump’s defence lawyer, Susan Necheles, has now arrived at a crucial phase of the cross-examination: the alleged sexual encounter.

Necheles presses Daniels on her direct evidence about how she arrived at Trump’s hotel suite, felt faint and overpowered, and sensed an imbalance of power.

“My own insecurities made me feel that way,” Daniels replies.

On Tuesday Judge Merchan warned prosecutors against lingering on the alleged sexual act during their questioning and he appears to be giving the defence team extra leeway to respond.

Susan Necheles is now focusing on discrepancies between Daniels’s accounts of her encounter with Donald Trump in 2006 over whether they ate dinner in his hotel room.

The defence lawyer points out that Daniels told Jimmy Kimmel, the late night TV host, in 2018 that she stayed in Trump’s hotel room for dinner because she was “very food-motivated”.

During a separate 60 Minutes interview the same year, Daniels said she had gone to the hotel suite for dinner but that they didn’t end up eating.

“Where I’m from, having dinner with someone doesn’t mean you have to put food in your mouth,” Daniels says.

Necheles puts it to the witness that her “words don’t mean what they say”.

Judge Merchan sustains an objection from prosecutors, meaning that the jurors must disregard it.

Daniels is being asked about her post-porn career as a medium who can communicate with the dead.

“You claimed to be able to speak with people’s dead relatives, right?” Necheles asks.

“I make clear it’s all entertainment,” Daniels replies.

In 2020 Daniels developed a supernatural TV show called Spooky Babes, in which she claimed to investigate a “malevolent paranormal phenomenon” at her home in New Orleans.

For context, Michael Avenatti, Daniels’s former lawyer, employed a similar line of questioning to attack her credibility during his 2022 trial for defrauding Daniels over a book deal.

The jury in that case convicted Avenatti of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.

The defence lawyer Susan Necheles continues to try to press home the point that Daniels was motivated by money to speak out about her alleged affair with Trump.

Daniels says she was paid $100,000 for the documentary Stormy that aired in the US on NBC’s streaming platform Peacock on the eve of the hush money trial.

Questioning then turns to Daniels’s work in the porn industry.

Necheles puts it to Daniels that she has a lot of experience making fictional stories about sex.

“If that story was untrue, I would’ve written it to be a lot better,” Daniels replies.

Susan Necheles, the defence lawyer, is grilling Daniels for celebrating Trump’s indictment in the hush money trial in March 2023.

The court is shown a Twitter/X post in which Daniels says she had “so many messages coming in that I can’t respond … also don’t want to spill my champagne”.

Daniels is also being quizzed about selling merchandise including a “Stormy Saint of Indictments candle” on the back of Trump being formally charged.

“Not unlike Mr Trump,” Daniels quips, prompting muted laughter in the courtroom.

Trump’s lawyer shows Daniels a signed statement that was released in January 2018 in which she denies that a sexual encounter with Trump took place.

Necheles reads the statement aloud, which in part says: “Rumours that I had received hush money from Donald Trump are completely false.”

“Correct, because it wasn’t a rumour, it was the truth,” Daniels replies. “I signed this only based on what my attorneys suggested,” she adds, according to the Associated Press.

Trump appears to be much calmer in the courtroom this morning.

According to CNN, the former president has been leaning back in his chair, closing his eyes and whispering to his lead defence counsel Todd Blanche during Daniels’ testimony.

When Daniels gave evidence on Tuesday, Trump was admonished by Judge Merchan for “cursing audibly” and shaking his head.

Trump is on a final warning by the judge that he risks being jailed if he is found to be in contempt of court again.

The court is being played a recording of a conversation between Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, and Keith Davidson, Daniels’s former attorney, who has already testified in this trial.

In it, Davidson says that Daniels is desperate for the money. Davidson references Daniels’s former publicist Gina Rodriguez in the recording.

The transcript has been entered into evidence.

Davidson: I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if he comes out and says, you know what, Stormy Daniels, she wanted this money more than you can ever imagine. I remember hearing her on the phone saying, you fucking Keith Davidson. You better settle this god-damn story. Because if he loses this election and he’s going to lose, if he loses this election we lose all f****** leverage this case is worth zero. And if that happens. I’m going to sue you because you lost this opportunity. So settle this f****** case.

The Florida senator Rick Scott is in the courtroom with Donald Trump.

Early on Thursday he told the television chat show Fox & Friends: “I support my friend. I support Donald Trump. This is just political persecution, it’s a crime.“

He also echoed Trump’s claims that the trial was a political attack.

“This is just the Democrats and Biden just trying to say, ‘Hey, this is my opponent — I’m trying to get him, put him in jail’,” Scott said. “This is going on in the United States of America, not in Nicaragua.”

Daniels has taken her place in the witness box and Trump’s defence lawyer, Susan Necheles, has continued with a line of questioning about inconsistencies in her statements.

Necheles is pressing Daniels on why she decided to accept the hush money payment in 2016 instead of holding a press conference, as she previously said she wanted to do.

Daniels replies that she was “running out of time” to get the story out in advance of the presidential election.

“You chose to make money, right?” Necheles asks.

“I chose to take the non-disclosure,” Daniels replied.

Trump has entered the courtroom, accompanied by his legal advisers Boris Epshteyn and Alina Habba, and the Florida senator Rick Scott, who is thought to be there for personal support.

In comments outside court Trump criticised Biden’s threat to cut off heavy artillery to Israel if it invades Rafah. “If any Jewish person voted for Joe Biden they should be ashamed of themselves,” Trump said.

He added that his lawyers had filed a “major motion” in an appeals court over the gag order that prevents him from speaking about witnesses.

Judge Juan Merchan has banned photographers from taking shots of Trump in the courtroom after one of them took an unauthorised picture of Trump from the aisle while walking into the well of the court.

Pictures were permitted only from the well of the court, per the judge’s order. Unless it is overturned on appeal, the ruling means that for the rest of the trial the public will see only sketches of the former president in the courtroom, such as the one below.

Photography is still permitted from the hallway outside the court.

Daniels was spotted this morning entering the courthouse in lower Manhattan, where she is expected to undergo more intense cross-examination by the defence counsel Susan Necheles.

Also seen entering the court this morning was Jeanine Pirro, a former judge, longtime Trump supporter and Fox News host, according to NBC News. Pirro has frequently derided the hush money court case in appearances on the network.

Donald Trump entered his motorcade at Trump Tower just before 8.40am en route to the Manhattan courthouse to attend his criminal hush money trial.

On Wednesday he hosted a dinner at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida for buyers of his NFT trading card. Those in attendance spent thousands of dollars for Trump’s “MugShot Edition” NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, according to Axios.

The NFTs are a reference to a picture taken during his arrest last year in Fulton County, Georgia, for allegedly conspiring to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.

Trump frequently complains that the hush money trial is preventing him from campaigning for the presidency.

As Trump comes under scrutiny in the courtroom, the race for the presidency continues.

And it seems his legal troubles have done little to dampen support for his campaign — he has held a small lead against President Biden for much of 2024.

Read the latest polls and predictions for the election.

While Daniels was on the witness stand on Tuesday, Judge Juan Merchan issued a warning to Trump’s lawyer.

“He is cursing audibly, and he is shaking his head visually and that’s contemptuous,” he said of the former president. “It has the potential to intimidate the witness and the jury can see that.”

Read Will Pavia’s report.

The hush money allegations are among dozens of civil and criminal charges the former president faces.

Away from the Manhattan courtroom, there has been a development in the classified documents case in Florida, in which Trump is accused of keeping sensitive national security papers at his Mar-a-Lago estate and obstructing official efforts to retrieve them. He denies the charges.

That trial was postponed indefinitely by the judge this week, meaning it may not go ahead before the presidential election in November.

Read David Charter’s report.

The porn star was under strict orders to leave out the most salacious details of her fateful night with the former president.

But, despite a Trump lawyer’s complaint about the prospect of Daniels mentioning “details of sexual acts”, the witness did not always comply.

Read Will Pavia’s sketch of Daniels’s first day of testimony.

Donald Trump has made history as the first American president to face a criminal trial. But what about the woman at the centre of it? What’s her story?

As Stormy Daniels prepares to testify for a second day, listen as Jane Mulkerrins and Luke Jones delve into the background of the case.

As Daniels spoke from the witness stand on Tuesday, it was clear she had not lost any of her razor-sharp wit or deadpan sense of humour, writes Jane Mulkerrins.

But behind her courtroom wisecracks lay something that sounded more like coercion.

Read more: She made jokes like the Stormy Daniels I know — but this was dark

Eleven miles from the court lies Rikers Island jail in the East River. The prospect that the prison, or a court cell, could be used to hold Trump loomed a little larger this week after the judge overseeing his trial warned that if he was caught verbally attacking witnesses or jurors one more time, “I will have to consider a jail sanction”.

If the former president continues to defy the judge, plans are in place about where he will be held in custody — and what will happen to his Secret Service detail.

Read Will Pavia’s in-depth look at what jail time could be like for Trump.

In the first day of her testimony Daniels described aspects of her alleged tryst with Trump in vivid detail, despite warnings from Judge Juan Merchan to prosecutors to keep testimony about the sexual act to a minimum.

Trump’s defence lawyers moved for a mistrial after the lunch break, telling Merchan that the witness evidence was extremely prejudicial and went beyond the boundaries that he had set in place.

Merchan agreed that some parts of Daniels’s testimony went too far, but said he did not believe that a mistrial was warranted.

Read the five key takeaways from Daniels’s testimony.

During the usual Wednesday rest day from the trial, Trump continued to vent on his Truth Social platform about a court-imposed gag order that bars him from speaking about witnesses in the hush money trial.

“It is a really bad feeling to have your Constitutional Right to Free Speech, such a big part of life in our Country, so unfairly taken from you, especially when all of the sleazebags, lowlifes, and grifters that you oppose are allowed to say absolutely anything that they want,” he wrote.

“It is hard to sit back and listen to lies and false statements be made against you knowing that if you respond, even in the most modest fashion, you are told by a Corrupt and Highly Conflicted Judge that you will be PUT IN PRISON, maybe for a long period of time.”

Trump has been held in contempt of court for ten separate violations of the order, and warned he faces jail time for any further breaches.