The adult film star who reportedly was paid $130,000 to keep quiet about a 2006 extramarital affair with Donald Trump was interviewed on Jimmy Kimmel after Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday evening and appeared to cast doubt on her previous denials of the affair.
Before the appearance on Kimmel, Stephanie Clifford, whose stage name is Stormy Daniels, released a second statement denying the affair and the reports from the Wall Street Journal that she was paid “hush money” by Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen weeks before the 2016 election.
Since the WSJ’s report came out, Daniels has declined to comment on the allegations, but In Touch magazine published a transcript of a 2011 interview with Daniels a week later, where she describes a sexual encounter with Trump in detail. Both Trump and his lawyer have denied the allegations.
During her appearance on Kimmel, Daniels played coy and made jokes in response to questions about the affair rather than confirming or denying the allegations. At the start of the show, Kimmel pulled out a copy of Daniels’ most recent statement denying the affair and compared the signature on that denial to her autograph on past portrait photos. When Kimmel asked her if she had signed the statement, she responded saying “I don’t know, did I?” and “That doesn’t look like my signature, does it?”
At one point, Kimmel began reading excerpts from In Touch’s transcript outlining the affair, but Daniels cut him off.
“I thought this was a talk show, not a horror movie. Because this is a whole different pay scale,” she said.
Toward the end of the interview, Kimmel pulled out puppets that looked like Daniels and Trump and asked her to answer “never have I ever” questions through the puppet, not as herself. But Daniels remained elusive, vaguely answering questions about whether she had ever had sex with a married man and whether it happened during a golf tournament, which is how she reportedly described the encounter to In Touch. She did confirm that she had never actually watched Trump’s reality TV show “Celebrity Apprentice,” even though she was reportedly talking to Trump about getting on the show back in 2006.
To add to the confusion, immediately after the show, Daniels’ lawyer told Buzzfeed that Daniels had signed the statement right in front of him on Tuesday.
“Stormy did indeed sign both denials,” he’s told Buzzfeed. “I thought she did a fantastic job on Jimmy Kimmel tonight. She was having fun on Kimmel and being her normal playful self.”
Watch the full interview with Daniels below:
