Stormy Daniels' Lie Detector Results About Her & Trump's Past Have Been Released
Two months after news first broke about an alleged 2006 affair between Donald Trump and adult film star Stormy Daniels, more details continue to unfold in the public eye. This time, a polygraph test taken by Daniels in 2011 is the subject of headline news, with The Wall Street Journal reporting on Tuesday, March 20, that the 39-year-old's lawyer paid $25,000 for a video showing his client taking the lie detector test. The outcome of the test was also revealed, showing Stormy Daniels' lie detector results deemed her to be truthful about two significant, blunt questions about the alleged affair with Trump.
The first of those questions asked whether Daniels — whose real name is Stephanie Clifford — had vaginal intercourse with Trump. The second asked whether she had unprotected sex with him.
"In the opinion of this examiner, Ms. Clifford is truthful about having unprotected vaginal intercourse with Donald Trump in July 2006," wrote Ronald Slay, the polygraph examiner who presided over the test in 2011. Slay also wrote that the "probability of deception" was less than 1 percent.
Daniels' answer to a third question, about whether Trump said he would get her on the reality show he hosted at the time, NBC's The Apprentice, yielded an inconclusive result. The White House, meanwhile, has denied reports of an affair.
The results of Daniels' lie detector test are detailed in a copy of the polygraph report, which was published by NBC News. According to The Wall Street Journal, Daniels took the lie detector test as part of an agreement to sell her story about the alleged affair with Trump to Life & Style magazine, a sister publication of In Touch Weekly magazine, for $15,000.
However, Daniels was never paid, The Journal reports, and Life & Style never published the story. In January, though, things changed. After the alleged affair became the subject of national news — following The Wall Street Journal 's reporting that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen paying Daniels $130,000 to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) before the 2016 election — In Touch published a transcript of Daniels 2011 interview.
In the interview, Daniels talks about how she met Trump in 2006, shortly after Melania Trump gave birth to the president youngest son, Barron. Daniels is quoted as saying,
It was a charity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe. I guess he was there to play golf, and I was there because the company I worked for was doing an appearance in the gift room. The first time I met him was actually out on the course. They brought us out to ride around and he kept looking at me and we were introduced. He was introduced to everybody. He kept looking at me and then we ended up riding to another hole on the same golf cart together and he’s like, “I want to come talk to you later.”
Daniels would later claim that she had sex with Trump at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
Fast forward 12 years, and that alleged affair is at the center of a legal battle, with Daniels having filed a lawsuit against Trump, claiming that the terms of the reported NDA brokered by Michael Cohen were invalid because the president never signed it himself.
"On or about October 29, 2016, only days before the election, two of the parties signed the Hush Agreement — Ms. Clifford and Mr. Cohen (on behalf of EC)," the suit claims. "Mr. Trump, however, did not sign the agreement, thus rendering it legally null and void and of no consequence."
Trump's legal team, for its part, has argued that Daniels now owes damages of $20 million; $1 million for each time she has broken a confidentiality agreement, court papers filed Friday, March 16, show.
In a contentious back-and-forth on CNN, Michael Cohen's legal representative promised to collect "every single penny" of that $20 million. Whether the results of Stormy Daniels' lie detector test play a factor in this legal battle remains to be seen.
