2018 has been quite a year for political news already. It’s been just in the first couple of weeks, for instance, that the wildly controversial book by Michael Wolff called Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House was published, setting off a chain of events that eventually culminated in Steve Bannon leaving his position at Breitbart News.
Now, there is other news to mark the very beginning of 2018, news that some have pointed out would, in most any other administration, dominate the news cycle for much longer than it’s set to in the case of this administration.
On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported a story that had been the subject of rumors for some time — an alleged affair between Donald Trump and porn star Stormy Daniels. According to the Journal, Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen arranged a “hush money” payment to Daniels of $130,000 just one month or so before the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4behFzOHdIg
Daniels had been in talks with Good Morning America and The Daily Beast about potentially getting her story published.
Now, The Daily Beast has published information about one of the three original sources that prompted their talks with Daniels about publishing her story, fellow porn star Alana Evans.
According to the publication, Evans was in the area of the July 2006 American Century Celebrity Golf Championship at the Edgewood Tahoe in Stateline, Nevada, which is where Daniels apparently met Trump, with the two of them posing for a photo.
As Evans explained:
‘It was the second day of our trip, we were in a hotel with a tattoo parlor, and the hotel had huge windows so you could see people outside. When I saw Stormy, I was like WTF? I opened the door, called out to her, and she joined me while [my colleague] got a tattoo. Stormy said she met Donald Trump and then tells me about the golf tournament and how she’s supposed to hang out with him later that night, and she invited me. Stormy said Donald knew exactly who she was and wanted to meet her.’
According to Evans, later that night, Daniels repeatedly called her and invited Evans to join her and Trump in the latter’s hotel room. At one point, Evans says she heard Trump himself on the other end of the phone, but she did not want to get involved and says that she turned her phone off.
The next day, she asked Daniels how the previous night had gone, and she explains what happened as follows:
‘She tells me, ‘All I’m going to say is: I ended up with Donald in his hotel room. Picture him chasing me around his hotel room in his tighty-whities.’ I was like, ‘Oh I really didn’t need to hear that!’ Then she said he offered her keys to his condos in Florida, and I was like, ‘Wow guess you had a good night,’ and that was the last we ever spoke of it.’
The Daily Beast also confirmed the alleged Trump/ Daniels relationship with two other sources.
Daniels’ alleged relationship with Trump took place in the months after Melania — the present first lady — gave birth to Donald’s youngest son, Barron. Melania and Barron who presently live with Donald Trump in the White House, moved there some months after Trump’s inauguration.
Cohen, in a statement provided to The Daily Beast, denied the Daniels/ Trump relationship but apparently did not deny the hush money payment.
As he put it:
‘These rumors have circulated time and again since 2011. President Trump once again vehemently denies any such occurrence as has Ms. Daniels.’
Of course, an extramarital affair with a porn star isn’t where Trump’s alleged sexual misconduct ends. In the era of Trump, a story of an alleged affair with a porn star is quickly overshadowed by the fact that the president is credibly alleged to have sexually harassed and assaulted numerous women in the years and decades before he decided to run for president.
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