Stormy Daniels has promised to tell the full story of her alleged affair with Donald Trump. And now that story — sometimes shocking, sometimes tragic — is finally here.
Titled Full Disclosure, the book promises to be an account of how Stormy Daniels came to be one of the central figures in the story of Donald Trump's presidency, and perhaps even its end — apparently to her surprise, as much as to anyone else's.
"I know that the deck has always been stacked against me, and there is absolutely no reason for me to have made it to where I am, right here talking to you," she writes. "Except that maybe the universe loves an underdog as much as I do. I own my story and the choices I made. They may not be the ones you would have made, but I stand by them."
Just as with the other bombshell books of the Trump presidency, such as Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury, we'll be going through that story and those choices, live.
She didn't want go out with him, she says — she was supposed to be meeting colleagues, anyway. And "what's funny is that sex never once entered my mind. Call me naïve, but he was one of the few straight guys — hell, any guy — who didn't immediately stare at my tits".
Trump was obsessed with Stormy, in her telling. Other actors were there but he paid little interest, and kept returning to the idea that she was a director, too.
"And then his bodyguard came back. He was in his late forties, mostly bald except for a wisp of close-cropped light hair up top. 'Mr Trump wants to know if you can have dinner with him tonight,' he said."
That bodyguard was Keith Schiller, who you've met before in previous live reads.
And here he enters: Donald Trump. (Or a person called Donald Trump — the president of course denies much of what is about to follow.)
"Let's go back to July 13, 2006".........
It's a hot day in Lake Tahoe. Stormy's at a golf course. She's with some of her colleagues from the pornography studio. "Our job for the day was simple: Celebrities would come through, and we'd say hello and offer them water or a snack. They could take a photo if they wanted."
Trump arrives. He's wearing "a yellow polo that clung to his stomach where it tucked into his khakis. He had a red cap, a Trump crest as a placeholder for the MAGA slogan none of us could see coming".
Stormy has our number, as head into chapter three:
Okay, so did you just skip to this chapter? Quick recap for those just joining us: my life is a lot more interesting than an encounter with Donald Trump. But I get it. Still, of all the people who I had sex with, why couldn't the word obsess over one of the hot ones?
And now we're into Stormy's entry into "mainstream" (that is, non-pornographic) films. She tells the story of auditioning for The 40-year-old Virgin. That, and she, were such a success that she would star in other Judd Apatow films, including Knocked Up.
Stormy tells the story of getting into writing adult films — something she does until this day. Her boyfriend and co-star had suggested she could never do it, so she did, and he loved it. She's been doing it ever since.
That eventually turned into directing, too. And she was a success at that as well.
And now onto Stormy's first time making pornography. She had made all the money she could in stripping, she says, and a friend was flying to LA to try and make it in films.
Right off the plane, she says, she was "booked to do an all-girl sex scene for Makin' It, a film for Wicket Pictures". She says that the experience put her off pornography, realising how artificial the entire thing is. And she describes at length the things she and her co-stars did for that film, which I'll leave you to Google if you so wish and leave out the pages of this family newspaper.
Here comes a long aside about going on tour with Pantera. Stormy hung out with the band for a few weeks on the road and fell in love with touring, she says.
Stormy is talking about her breast implants. "I am a firm believer in capitalism. And I noticed that the girls at the Gold Club who invested in breast implants got more tips." So she went to a doctor who looked at her chest, grunted at her, and agreed to do the procedure; he also made them much larger than she'd expected. She wanted to sue him but didn't in the end.
"Now I've gone on to win many Best Breasts trophies," she writes. "And every time I accept one of those, I thank him by name. Best twenty-two hundred dollars I ever spent.
"I also named my breasts because I love them so much. Thunder and Lightning. I've had the same implants since 1999 — they're almost old enough to drink."
Stormy's telling the story of the first time she entered a strip club. (Although she's keen to stress this wasn't really up to the name — she describes it as a "titty bar".)
When she got there, the dancers started fussing over her, and encouraged her to do a guest set. She did, and it went well. So she started doing it regularly.
[Another little aside note: Stormy's style is probably actually the best of these books I've read live on the internet. No Wolffian dramatics, no Comeyesque high-mindedness; it's all just very frank and occasionally a little fun. Her mother breaks up with her partner: "I know, right? We were pulling for those two kids, weren't we?" she jokes.]
[Skipping through again, past a whole series of stories about horses. Again, if this is interesting to you then do feel free to buy the book, but I'm just going to pass over this for now.]
Later the school friend who was abused at the same time would tell a counsellor at school. And Stormy would be called into his office, and asked whether it was true: she said yes, and that he'd done the same to her. He said that couldn't be true because she was fine, when her friend wasn't.
She says she didn't even want to share this story in the book because it would play into the idea that "women involved in the adult entertainment business are all 'damaged'". She had kept it bottled up until the past June, she said — it only came back to her when she returned to her childhood home for a profile.
She talks also about another sexual assault: a high-school ex-boyfriend who grabbed her at school and a fight ensued. Her mother was brought into school to hear that they would both be punished, Stormy says, which prompted a furious response: "You just taught my daughter that it's okay to be sexually assaulted".
She goes on to say that she actually blamed her mother for that, for having not intervened before when she was being abused.
Stormy is relating, very frankly, the horrifying abuse she suffered at the hands of a neighbour. Her and a friend were both repeatedly raped by this man, she says, for two years.
[I'm skipping through a bit here: past first crushes and first friends, which are probably interesting if you're a Stormy Daniels fan — in which case you should buy the book, obviously — but have little bearing on the reason we're all here. That's because of a scandal that could bring down the president, by the way, not the salacious stuff.]
Stormy's childhood is bleak stuff. Her father leaves, triggering a terrible time for her mother, who smoked endlessly. Her neighbourhood falls apart. Her grandmother dies and her grandfather leaves, and she's without the place that had served as solace growing up. Her own house is a state: rats take over one room, and roaches hide in her bed, leaving her with scars on her leg that last until today.
Here's an introduction to a lesson that Stormy seems to think is important: when she was young, she was taken to dance classes because she hoped to be a ballerina. The owner of the dance studio, Donna, heard Stormy screaming repeatedly as her mother attempted to pin a hat on her head.
"Miss Donna hobbled over and shook a finger at me as she exhaled smoke. 'You have to suffer to be beautiful,' she rasped. 'Beauty is pain.'"
Onto Stormy's parents. Her mother was "beautiful", young, "short and thin", though not especially smart. Her father was taller, "with chiselled features and olive skin owed to Cherokee blood somewhere down the line". Stormy, she says, is a mix of the two.
They had a passionate relationship, "and she had a jealous redhead temper". They cared about each other deeply but also tendency to throw things at each other, she writes.
(I'm going to skip through some of the youth stuff fairly quickly: it's actually quite interesting, and worth buying the book for, but we'll be concentrating on summarising here so I'll just give you the shape rather than the texture of the stuff.)
Please allow a moment for the live blog to load.
