Stormy Daniels Versus the World

T
he only thing that has kept me alive is that I’m a petty bitch,” says Stormy Daniels. “There would be too many people happy if I died. I’m alive because of spite.”

Daniels is sitting on the back porch of an undisclosed domicile, in an undisclosed city in an undisclosed state. There’s a gun on the table beside her, which, she says, she carries wherever she goes — “but never in a state where it’s illegal,” she quickly adds. “Let’s not give them a reason to search me.” 

For the past few months, she and her husband, adult-film star and director Barrett Blade, have been traveling across the country in an RV, with Daniels doing stand-up and promoting voter-registration efforts. They fled their home in the middle of the night after the New York Post published a photo of her house — the result, she believes, of her testimony at former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial in May, when Trump’s defense team displayed an unredacted document containing her address in the courtroom. She says she was doxed immediately, with Trump supporters barraging her with death threats, forcing her to flee and relocate her beloved horses. (Daniels is a competitive equestrian.)

Daniels has her own theory as to why she was doxed, but ultimately, her explanation is simple: “They’re just trying to break me in every way possible,” she says flatly. 

Throughout our conversation, Daniels frequently refers to an amorphous “they.” Sometimes, she is explicit about who “they” is in reference to: Either it’s Bill Maher, who accused her of being a “bad witness” in Trump’s trial (“I’m gonna punch him in his little tiny dick”); or Megyn Kelly, who speculated that Daniels’ encounter with Trump was a “setup” (“What a hypocritical twat”); or Michael Avenatti, her former attorney who is currently serving time in prison for embezzling $300,000 from her (“What a little bitch”); or Susan Necheles, Trump’s defense attorney, who subjected her to intense cross-examination (“She looks like someone put Richard Simmons in the microwave, OK? No — she looks worse than Richard Simmons does now”). 

But mostly, Daniels doesn’t specify who “they” is — because frankly, she doesn’t feel she has to. “They” is anyone who has fucked her over or underestimated her or attempted to profit off her. It’s anyone who has called her a whore or an opportunist or a liar. It’s even some of the #Resistance liberals who show up to her appearances, praising her for standing up to Trump but calling her Stephanie, the name she was born with. “You have these people going, ‘#SayHerName. Her name is Stephanie.’ I’m like, ‘I don’t go by that. It’s a dead name,’” she says angrily. “If you want to respect me, ask me what I want to be called.”

“They” is a club with many members, and six years after the Trump story first broke, after the lawsuits and the trial and the threats, Daniels is still keeping close tabs on its rolls. As her close friend and former partner, writer and attorney Denver Nicks, puts it: “There are a fucking lot of people trying to take advantage of Stormy, or who want to hurt her.” Daniels used to be scared of Trump and his supporters, but now, she says, “I’m more mad.”

IF ANYONE HAS EARNED the right to feel like the entire world has conspired against them, Daniels probably has. For the past six years, her life has been defined by an alleged sexual encounter she had with Trump in 2006 in a Lake Tahoe hotel room. That encounter served as the basis for Trump’s criminal trial earlier this year, in which he was charged with falsifying business documents to cover up a $130,000 “hush money” payment his attorney, Michael Cohen, made to Daniels in 2016 in order to aid his political campaign. 

When Daniels was subpoenaed to explain that night — a story she has been repeating, first privately to friends and then publicly to the media, for the past 18 years or so — her life had just started to go back to normal. She had just gotten married and had finally settled into a peaceful co-parenting relationship with her ex, with whom she shares a 13-year-old daughter. She says she was ambivalent about testifying. “There were many, many moments where I didn’t want to do it,” she says. “But if they hadn’t called me, it would’ve looked like I couldn’t be trusted. And that would have been a bad look.”

When Daniels took the stand in May, she faced questioning attacking her credibility from Necheles, Trump’s defense attorney, whom she refers to in her stand-up comedy routine as a “fucking cunt.” “It was so much more traumatic and expensive and grueling than I ever thought it would be,” she tells me. Her testimony also seemed to rankle Trump himself, who was reprimanded by the judge for cursing and muttering under his breath while she was on the stand — because, she says simply, “he knew I was telling the truth.” 

When Trump was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business documents, it led to what she characterizes as a “huge shift” in the public perception of her. “People who didn’t believe me are like, ‘Oh, my God, I think she was actually right,’” she says. 

In one version of the story of Daniels’ life following the trial, she’s embarked on something of a victory lap. I first meet her backstage at an August stand-up set in Asheville, North Carolina, where she hosts #StormTheVote, a campaign to register voters for the 2024 election. Prior to flying to Asheville, I’d been told by several people that she was funny and charming, but a difficult person to get a hold of, and this becomes clear within moments of my arrival. I’m ushered backstage by Blade, a gravelly voiced man wearing multiple vests, for our interview 45 minutes after it was scheduled. We make small talk about ghosts (Daniels is a paranormal investigator) before she’s hustled out for a champagne meet-and-greet. 

Daniels has been doing stand-up on and off for the past few years. When we sit down for a three-hour Zoom interview a few days after the set, she says she avoids talking about Trump in her stand-up for the same reason she cites for how she’s survived the past six years: out of spite. “It was a little fuck you to the people who were there to try to heckle me into talking shit about him, or journalists who were saying, ‘Oh, she doesn’t have anything else going on,’” she recalls. When I catch her set in Asheville, most of it is not about politics at all, but about the porn world, including one particularly graphic anecdote about a starlet who unwittingly imbibes a bottle of douche prior to her first shoot. 

But the subject of “tangerine Hitler,” as Daniels refers to him at one point in her set, was unavoidable that night, as Trump had been in the city for a rally just two days prior and his impact was still reverberating: While en route to the show, I bumped into a clean-cut man in a MAGA cap, bellowing “White power. Vote Trump,” and I am told there was at one point a small cadre of protesters outside of the venue. Daniels tells me that for this reason, she devoted more of her act than usual to the trial and her testimony, throwing in a few cracks about Trump’s dick for good measure. 

There would be too many people happy if I died. I’m alive because of spite.

Daniels’ friend, porn performer and director Siouxsie Q, flew in to rally audience members to register to vote, introducing Daniels as “the girl who’s gonna save democracy for each and every one of us.” During the meet-and-greet, most of the attendees clearly viewed Daniels in the same vein. One attendee, Anthony Sutton, a North Carolina town councilman who is openly gay, became emotional as he described how Daniels “stands for everything that I stand for, as far as freedom and speaking your truth”; another, Patti Cutspec, told me she wept while watching coverage of Daniels’ testimony, blinking back tears as she described how it gave her the courage to speak openly about a similar encounter she had 40 years ago. “I feel she speaks for me,” Cutspec said. 

Still, Daniels clearly chafes against the label of liberal folk hero. Despite being hailed as a #MeToo heroine, she has consistently maintained that what allegedly happened between her and Trump in the Lake Tahoe hotel room was, though uncomfortable, consensual. “There are plenty of women and people who need to be spoken up for and to be lifted up and to let their voices be heard,” she says. “But I am not one of them. And when you’re talking over me, that’s almost worse than me not talking at all.” She says she is skeptical of the #MeToo movement in general, categorizing some of its proponents as “trying to exploit it for their own narrative.” This may stem from what Daniels characterizes as a general mistrust toward women. “Most of the time, they over-sympathize [with me], or they harbor some sort of resentment towards [people in] the industry, even subconsciously,” she says. “I’ve been fucked over more by women than anybody else.”

These views seem consistent with Daniels’ general political stance, which is far more complex than many of the #Resistance liberals in her audience probably would like it to be. Though she is staunchly in favor of LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights, she is still a registered Republican (the fact that she hasn’t changed her affiliation is, again, largely for spite: “It really pisses [Democrats] off,” she says). And even though she is publicly campaigning against Trump as part of her #StormTheVote initiative, she has yet to explicitly endorse Kamala Harris. “I’m scared if I endorse her, it will harm her,” she says. “Or everybody will be like, ‘See? She was working for the Democrats the whole time.’”

Being anointed a progressive savior is “a bit of an ill-fitting costume” for Daniels, says Nicks. “She’s not a leftist activist, and she’s liable to say a lot of things that offend a lot of people,” he tells me. “[But she] is just fucking made irate by the great hypocrisy of people in power hurting the powerless.” As Daniels puts it, “I don’t think of [being a #Resistance symbol] as a crown. I think of it as a helmet, because I’m just gonna get shot out of a cannon. And I don’t think it would have fit on anybody else’s head.”

Unlike her friend Kathy Griffin, who has said she struggles with complex PTSD following her own brush with Trump supporters after doing a photo shoot with a mock-up of his severed head, Daniels says she has been able to cope with the harassment, in part due to her experience facing stigma as a sex worker: “Being in the industry for so long before this, I developed a thick skin. If I had never been spit at or called a whore to my face, I don’t think I would have survived all this.” 

Indeed, Daniels doesn’t seem to be doing a post-conviction victory lap so much as she appears to be suspended in something of a state of purgatory: between being staunchly apolitical and being feted as a savior of democracy; between a quiet life at home with her husband and daughter and careening around the country in an RV; between wanting her day in court and wanting the freedom to walk onstage and make jokes about her asshole. She feels similarly stranded between the porn world and the mainstream. Though Daniels concedes that the past six years have afforded her mainstream opportunities she would not otherwise have had — a stand-up tour, a book deal, a cameo on Saturday Night Live — they are limited by the fact that her notoriety is “a double-edged sword.” 

“No one will let me write and direct, even though I’m better at it than most of the mainstream directors I’ve been on fucking set with,” she says. “[Either] they don’t take a porn star seriously, or they’re too afraid to get involved with Stormy Daniels. People claim to be on my side, but how many big producers and stuff do I know who just won’t give me a chance?” And even though she has been feted by members of the mainstream media for years — including Jimmy Kimmel, who is featured in the documentary Stormy, and Anderson Cooper, who interviewed her — she is quick to note that none of these people donated to her GoFundMe following the trial. “They always said they would [donate],” she says. “And not one single person had my back.” (Both Cooper’s and Kimmel’s reps declined to comment.)

I developed a thick skin. If I had never been spit at or called a whore, I don’t think I would have survived this.

Daniels feels similarly abandoned by the adult industry, even though she has spent nearly two decades as one of its top stars and directors. She says few of the big names in the industry have publicly supported her. “All these people who’ve made money off of my body and my image — [they didn’t give me] a fucking dime,” she says. “Nothing from Brazzers, nothing from Pornhub. Where you at, Penthouse? Nothing from Hustler. Where you at, Larry [Flynt]?” (To be fair to Flynt, if Daniels is waiting for donations from him, she’ll be waiting a long time: He died in 2021.)

With both mainstream and adult establishments perceiving her as toxic, Daniels forged her own path in the industry. She launched StormyTV, a Roku channel that on Sept. 15 premiered Decoy, a feature-length thriller she wrote and directed; she also shot a 12-episode comedy series with her friend and opening act, stand-up comic Greg Studley, titled Woke Up Late (“as in, like, the woke stuff, because we’re very politically incorrect comedians, and we’re terrible people,” she says). 

There is a universe in which Daniels could focus entirely on such projects and avoid politics altogether. There is also an (admittedly less probable) reality in which Trump could lose the election and disappear into the ether and she would no longer have to go onstage and answer questions about his genitalia.

Before I speak with Daniels, her friend, Stormy filmmaker Sarah Gibson, tells me that thanks to the vindication of Trump’s conviction, Daniels feels closer to that world than ever before. “For so long, she couldn’t push past her own darkness,” Gibson says. “Now, there’s a sound to her voice I’ve never heard before that sounds really optimistic and relieved and hopeful.”

When I ask Daniels if she feels this way, however, she laughs. “I mean, I’m living in an RV,” she says sardonically. “I feel at peace that he’s been held accountable, at least by a jury. I feel vindicated in a way, but he’s trying everything he can to overturn it, and what’s going to happen if he gets elected? I am at peace with myself; I did the right thing. [But] I can’t be at peace with what’s going on now politically.” She says her life following the trial has been “like a repeat of 2018, but worse.” “I’m older and more tired and more bitter and more financially and emotionally exhausted than I was before,” she says. 

Surprisingly, her feelings about Trump are somewhat more complex. “I don’t think he necessarily hates me,” she says. “I think he hates the situation [I’ve put him in].” She has consistently maintained her belief that Trump never truly wanted to become president, and is only running because his ego prevents him from acknowledging failure. But that doesn’t detract from the existential threat she knows a second Trump term would pose. “He doesn’t want to be president. He wants to be king,” she says. “He wants to sit on his gold-toilet throne and wear a fuckin’ — I don’t know. I do hate him, in that way.” 

So Daniels keeps touring, and keeps running, and keeps speaking out against Trump — even though she feels she has lost far more by doing so than she has gained. She still has to pay Trump’s legal fees related to a separate defamation case, still has to contend with the threats posed by the amorphous “they.” And if he wins the election, she feels there is a “strong possibility” he will have her tried for treason. “[Either way], there will be chaos,” she says. She is constantly faced with reminders that her life has changed, that the sense of security she felt she had achieved prior to 2018 will continue to elude her. 

“I’m sitting in this yard, and I’m thinking, ‘My horses should be standing there,’” she says. “I should be looking at my daughter’s pony. It’s simple things like that, which are a reminder that I have to live this every day.” 

I tell her about the conversation I had with the audience member who felt moved to come forward about a nonconsensual encounter 40 years later thanks to Daniels’ testimony, and I ask her whether hearing that from people is any consolation. 

“I mean … yes,” she says. “But at the same time? I also wish I were looking at my horses right now.”