Daniels testified that her friend encouraged her to take Trump up on his dinner offer, telling her: “What could possibly go wrong?”
She said she agreed to go and went to meet Trump at the hotel where he was staying.
“I arrived and went upstairs. Keith had given me very specific instructions to take an elevator going to the penthouse floor,” Daniels testified, referring to Trump’s bodyguard. She said the bodyguard told her that Trump was waiting for her inside. She entered and waited in a foyer with a “big, beautiful wooden table” with flowers. It was there where she encountered Trump, she said.
“He was wearing silk, or satin, pajamas, that I immediately made fun of him for, and said, ‘Did Mr. Hefner know you stole his pajamas?'” Daniels remembered. “I told him to go change and so he obliged very politely.”
Trump came back in a dress shirt and dress pants, she testified. The hotel suite was “three times the size of my apartment,” Daniels said, describing the room in detail.
Eventually they sat at the dining room table.
“It wasn’t even dark outside, just yet, and he said, ‘You know, it’s a little bit early, would you mind just talking to each other?'” she recalled, saying they talked about her childhood and “get-to-know-you type of things.”
They also discussed her work, according to Daniels: “He was very interested in how I went from just being a pornstar to writing and directing … He was very interested in some of the business aspects of it, which I thought was cool. Are there unions? How much do you get paid?”
Daniels also said they had a “very brief” discussion about his wife, Melania. “He said, ‘Don’t worry about it, we actually don’t sleep in the same room,'” she told the court.
Throughout the conversation, Daniels remembered, Trump would “ask me questions and then not let me finish the answer — it was almost like he wanted to one up me, to talk about himself.”
Eventually, she said she had “had enough of his arrogance and cutting me off and not giving me my dinner.” She testified that she asked him, “Are you always this rude?” and said, “Someone should spank you.”
Trump gave her a magazine, Daniels testified. “I don’t think he expected me to do it,” she said. “So I said, ‘Turn around,’ and I swatted him with it … right on the butt.”
The conversation turned to “The Apprentice,” Daniels remembered. Trump told her that she should be a contestant, to which she replied: “There’s no way that NBC would allow an adult actress on television.”
“He said, ‘You remind me of my daughter, she’s smart and beautiful and people underestimate her as well,'” Daniels said. She added that Trump offered to tell her what the show’s challenges were ahead of time: “I can’t have you win … but you can at least make a good showing.”
Daniels said she and Trump spoke in the suite for “close to two hours.”
With that, the court took a break. Trump did not look at Daniels as she testified.
