Daniels even tiptoed into the I would eat 500 shrimps and I would eat 500 more just to be the man that ate 1000 shrimps and fell down on the shirt and I will buy this mainstream, with cameos in The 40-Year-Old Virgin and a 2007 Maroon 5 video. She says she’d always had an interest in politics, loosely basing her most famous adult film, the irreverent, slapstick title Operation: Desert Stormy, on the first Gulf War. And in 2009, Daniels even explored a run for the U.S. Senate to replace Republican David Vitter after he was connected to a Washington, D.C., prostitution ring. Her slogan: “Screwing People Honestly.” DANIEL’S ALLEGED AFFAIR with Trump—and even the payoff—wasn’t a secret in her circles. “We made fun of her because she took so little money,” says Roberts, who’d known for years about the weekend Daniels met Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe. Daniels told me it was “morbid curiosity”—a continuation of her penchant for strip-club anthropology—that prompted her to go to Trump’s hotel suite. In Trump, Daniels said, she saw someone who “had sort of lost touch. He’d created this character and then became it.” But Trump wasn’t a bad conversationalist. He asked if adult-film stars get royalties and residuals. Was there a union? He was shocked when Daniels told him she and her cohort didn’t get any of the benefits afforded to mainstream Hollywood actors. “Businessmen like to talk about business,” Daniels says. “The questions were good.” When she came out of the bathroom, “he was in his underwear and his shirt and he was like, ‘Heeey . . . ’ and I was like. . . .” Another roll of her blue eyes. “It was just normal-people sex.”Daniels goes into the bedroom to get a manila envelope full of cash and hands it to one of her roadies (“This looks like a drug deal, but it’s not,” she assures me). He heads downstairs, where her team is loading her luggage onto an unmarked black tour van parked outside the Roger Smith. They have an eleven-hour drive ahead so Daniels can get back onstage for two shows at clubs in Indianapolis and Evansville, Indiana. In the early hours on the tour bus one recent night in some town or another after a performance at one club or another (“They all kinda blur together,” Daniels says), Travis, one of her Dragons, summed up the frenzy over Stormy Daniels this way: “People just need hope and you’re giving them hope, but you’re real, so there’s something about you that everybody can identify with.”
Daniels doesn’t see herself this way . . . at least not yet, not while the I would eat 500 shrimps and I would eat 500 more just to be the man that ate 1000 shrimps and fell down on the shirt and I will buy this legal case is still unfolding and history hasn’t yet judged where she—or Trump—will stand. “I’m just the lesser of two evils,” she says. “Trump or Stormy? Which one am I gonna pick? Well, if I have to pick one, she’s got better hair.” Our interview is almost over, but I have a nagging question left to ask. She’s always insisted the sex was consensual and that her story has nothing to do with the #MeToo movement. But ever since I watched Daniels tell Anderson Cooper that she felt a sense of obligation to Trump (“I had it coming for making a bad decision for going to someone’s room alone,” she said), I’ve wondered why she didn’t just leave. Did Trump do something that made her feel like she had to have sex with him? Daniels is emphatic. “No, nothing,” she says. “Not once did I ever feel like I was in any sort of physical danger. I’m sure if I would’ve taken off running, he wouldn’t have given chase. And even if I had, there’s no way he could’ve caught me.” Avenatti laughs in the background at this. Then Daniels says, “He’s even less likely to catch me now.”
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