Stormy Daniels feels “a little vindicated” after former president Donald Trump was found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records. While, as of Friday morning, the porn star had not yet commented on the verdict herself, her husband, Barrett Blade, spoke to CNN on Thursday.
“This wasn’t her seeking justice for herself. She was standing up for herself early on and saying what was right, but this whole hush-money trial has really … it’s not her story,” Blade told Erin Burnett.
The trial centered on hush-money payments made in 2016 through Trump’s then-fixer Michael Cohen, who paid Daniels $130,000 to stay quiet about the night she had sex with Trump in his Lake Tahoe hotel suite back in 2006. On the stand, Daniels claimed that Trump told her she reminded him of his daughter Ivanka and that she spanked him with a rolled-up magazine. She began to describe the sex she had with Trump, but his lawyer objected and Judge Juan Merchan agreed that such details weren’t necessary.
Daniels’s husband told CNN that while they would have respected a different outcome, a guilty verdict feels good.
Daniels does not feel entirely out of the woods yet, Blade noted. “She’s still pretty stoic. It’s a big weight off her shoulders at this point,” Blade said. “I think it brings another weight upon her shoulders of what happens next?”
The porn star did not have an easy time with the trial by any means. Daniels’s lawyer, Clark Brewster, said that she wore a bulletproof vest underneath her clothes every day until she arrived at the courthouse. “She was paralyzed with fear, not of taking the stand or telling her story, but what some nut might do to her,” Brewster told Anderson Cooper.
Trump will be sentenced on July 11, just four days before the Republican National Convention kicks off in Milwaukee. For now, Daniels doesn’t know what’s going to happen next. “I guess we take it day by day,” Blade said.
