FBI Just Gave Stormy Daniels A Rude Awakening
The FBI has subpoenaed and interviewed the manager who DailyMail.com revealed tried to
sell Stormy Daniels's story of sex with Donald Trump, it was reported Wednesday.
TMZ said agents had spoken to Gina Rodriguez, who DailyMail.com previously disclosed had
tried to help Daniels sell her story for $200,000 in the run-up to the 2016 election.
The subpoena told her to hand over communications between her and Michael Cohen – Trump's
embattled personal attorney – Keith Davidson, the porn star's then attorney, and with
Daniels herself.
The website reported that there were no communications with Cohen, but 'numerous' communications
with Daniels and Davidson.
The development emerged more than a month after DailyMail.com revealed how Rodriguez
made the rounds of celebrity magazines, television shows, and websites in the run-up to the 2016
presidential election, hoping someone would bite.
She promised a story of Stormy's titillating sexcapade with the man who would soon be in
the Oval Office.
Rodriguez is herself a former porn star who quit in 2008 and who told the New York Times
that she had represented, among others, Octomom – encouraging her to produce a solo sex
tape – and Sydney Leathers, Anthony Weiner's adult sexting partner who prompted his penultimate
disgrace in 2015.
But with polling day getting ever closer, and her chances of a payday getting more remote
as Trump appeared doomed to lose to Hillary Clinton, Daniels gave up on her money chase
and accepted the $130,000 that Trump attorney Michael Cohen had dangled in front of her
in a bid to keep the story quiet.
Cohen insists he paid the money out of his own pocket and was not reimbursed by either
the Trump campaign or the Trump Organization.
'It looks to me that she accepted Cohen's money because she could not get the money
she wanted from anyone else,' one media executive said.
DailyMail.com was among the outlets approached by Stormy's manager Gina Rodriguez in October
2016.
We turned her down.
Daniels told her version of her tryst with Trump to Anderson Cooper on CBS's 60 Minutes
on Sunday.
Cooper reported that she had sold her story to a tabloid magazine for $15,000 years before,
but it did not run because of libel threats from Cohen and she was never paid.
After Trump won the Republican presidential nomination interest in Daniels's story grew
and she claims she turned down offers to speak.
Stormy made it seem as though she did not seek to sell her story, telling Cooper: 'Suddenly
people are reaching out to me again, offering me money.
Large amounts of money.
Was I tempted?
Yes – I struggle with it,' she told Cooper.
Then, she claims, Cohen approached her with his $130,0000 offer.
But the fact is that Stormy's team was aggressively pursuing a deal to sell her story to the highest
bidder.
During the 60 Minutes interview, Daniels, 39, said she had 'swatted' the future
president's backside a couple of times with a copy of Trump Magazine and that they had
had sex just once in a Nevada hotel suite.
Cooper did not ask her to elaborate on what the sex was like.
Daniels, 39, an adult film actress whose body of work includes The Witches of Breastwick,
Camp Cuddlypines Powertool Massacre, and Spreading My Seed, mused to Cooper on whether she should
now be speaking out.
She pointed out she was not being paid for the interview and when Cooper asked her if
the notoriety would help her 'Make America Horny Again' tour of strip clubs, she replied
that she could end up being shunned.
'I could automatically be alienating half of my fan base right at this very moment,'
she said.
But in 2016, Daniels saw her opportunity to cash in on the one-night-stand that she says
occurred 10 years earlier, and she had a picture of herself in a body-hugging cropped black
tank top standing next to Trump in a yellow golf shirt and red cap, to back her claim.
Rodriguez pushed Daniels's story to the media around October 17, three weeks before
the election and the same day that Cohen registered a limited liability company called Essential
Solutions in Delaware.
Rodriguez said she was keen for the story to appear before the final presidential debate
between Trump and Clinton, set for October 19.
Some 10 days later, Essential Solutions paid Daniels $130,000 after she signed an agreement
not to talk about Trump.
The agreement used pseudonyms — David Dennison for Trump and Peggy Peterson for Daniels.
Daniels and her attorney Michael Avenatti claim the agreement is non-binding because
Trump did not sign in, although Cohen did.
Trump, then 60, was playing in a celebrity golf tournament at the Edgewood Tahoe Golf
Course in Stateline, Nevada, in July 2006, finishing 62nd in a field of 80.
Daniels was working a gifting suite for Wicked Pictures, one of the leading porn companies,
and says he invited her up to his suite at the Harrah's Casino.
Trump's wife Melania had given birth to their only child, Barron, just three months
earlier.
Once she got to the room, Daniels says Trump showed her a copy of his new magazine — which
had a picture of the businessman in a navy suit and blue tie on the cover under the caption
'On Top of the World.'
She says she asked him whether boasting about himself normally worked with women, a question
she says surprised him.
'He looked very taken aback, like he didn't really understand what I was saying.'
she told Cooper.
'And I was like, "Someone should take that magazine and spank you with it."
I don't think anyone's ever spoken to him like that, especially, you know, a young
woman who looked like me.
'And I said "Give me that," and I just remember him going, "You wouldn't.
Hand it over."
And so he did, and I was like, "Turn around, drop 'em."
'So he turned around and pulled his pants down a little,' she added saying he was
wearing underwear.
'I just gave him a couple swats.
'
Daniels — real name Stephanie Clifford — said Trump then stopped talking about himself and
even offered to see if he could persuade NBC executives to allow her to appear on his TV
show, Celebrity Apprentice.
h/t dailymail
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