Stormy Daniels, the porn star at the center of former President Donald Trump’s unprecedented indictment, has said sales of merchandise bearing shows of support for her have surged since criminal proceedings were brought against him.
“#TeamStormy merch [and] autograph orders are pouring in,” she said in a tweet on Thursday evening. “Thank you for that…but allow a few extra days for shipment.”
The adult movie star, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, also said she had been receiving “so many messages…that I can’t respond,” and thanked her backers for their “support and love.”
Daniels sells an array of merchandise on her website, including a $30 dog chew toy that resembles former President Trump and several T-shirts with the slogan “Team Stormy” printed on them. The shirts are priced at $20 each.
Trump was indicted in New York City on Thursday on charges centered around payments made to Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal during the 2016 presidential campaign. The payments were allegedly made to stop the women speaking out about extramarital sexual encounters they had engaged in with Trump.
Historic indictment
The indictment is the first former president in U.S. history to be criminally indicted. He is expected to appear in Manhattan for arraignment next week, where he will be processed.
Trump has denied the allegations that he attempted to buy either woman’s silence, labeling the Manhattan investigation into the payments “the greatest witch hunt in history.”
According to Daniels, the pair slept together in 2006, the year after Trump wed his third and current wife Melania. She said they had consensual sex after meeting at a celebrity golf tournament and he invited her up to his hotel suite.
Daniels also said Trump kept in touch via telephone calls over the following year, and she met him at another hotel in 2007 to discuss her possible appearance on reality show Celebrity Apprentice, which Trump was involved with at the time. She claimed that she rejected Trump’s advances during this meeting, and a month later he called to inform her he had not been able to get her a spot on his show.
In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, which Trump went on to win, Daniels’s lawyer signed a nondisclosure agreement with Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer, in exchange for a six-figure sum. The NDA reportedly included a space for Trump’s signature, but he never signed the document.
Two years later, Trump’s lawyers said the NDA would not be enforced as he had never signed it. Daniels later filed a defamation lawsuit against Trump after he accused her of carrying out a “con job” by saying she had been threatened over speaking out about her relationship with him.
Last year, she was ordered to pay almost $300,000 in legal fees to Trump when an appeals court upheld an earlier decision that she had not been defamed by the former president. Daniels said in a tweet, however, that she would “go to jail before I pay a penny.”
Meanwhile, Cohen, who was paid a total of $420,000 by the Trump Organization for fixing the 2016 payment to Daniels, was later indicted and pleaded guilty in 2018 to violating federal campaign finance law in connection to the payments. However, charges were not filed against Trump himself, despite Cohen alleging he had arranged the payments at Trump’s direction.
“Time and time again I felt it was my duty to cover up his dirty deeds,” he said as he was given a three-year prison sentence. His prison term, most of which was spent in home confinement, ended in 2021.
Trump has denied Daniels’s story about their sexual encounter and claimed the $130,000 payment he made to her was to prevent her from making “false and extortionist accusations.”
Daniels has long used her Twitter account, which has 1.3 million followers, to criticize Trump and argue against his assertions that he never tried to buy her silence.
