DALLAS _ The woman sits hooked to an oxygen machine that whirrs like a vacuum cleaner, in an old house in Baton Rouge, in a rough neighborhood she can't afford to leave.
She clicks on the TV. Like the rest of America, she can't escape Stormy Daniels, the porn star who says she was paid $130,000 before the presidential election to keep quiet about her affair with Donald Trump. At the time, his wife, Melania, was home with their 4-month-old son.
Each image of the smiling, busty blonde _ who is parlaying the alleged affair into a national strip club tour _ strikes the woman like a bullet. And it's not just because it's an attack on her beloved president.
That 38-year-old isn't Stormy Daniels to her. It's Stephanie Gregory Clifford. Her daughter. The little girl who loved horses.
"It hurts me deeply," said Sheila Gregory, 64. "My friends all say the same thing: 'I can't believe that is the same sweet child _ you took such good care of her.'
"I say, 'How do you think I feel?'"
Gregory said she hasn't spoken to her daughter in 12 years _ around the time of the Trump encounter, which they've never discussed. She says she calls Daniels every few weeks, but they never connect. She says she doesn't know why her daughter stopped talking to her.
Daniels is on her "Make America Horny Again" tour around the nation's strip clubs, shining a spotlight on her raunchy performances. But interviews with Daniels' parents, her neighbors in the quiet Dallas suburb of Forney and her acquaintances in the North Texas horseback-riding community reveal a human life that's far more complex than caricature.
Daniels, who declined to be interviewed, has acknowledged previously that she doesn't talk to her parents anymore. Even so, her attorney, Michael Avenatti, responded with just two words to her mother's stated attempts to contact her daughter: "Fake news."
