Stormy Daniels was threatened with physical harm in 2011 if she went public with her story of an alleged affair with Donald Trump, the porn actress said in an interview broadcast Sunday on "60 Minutes."
A few weeks after Trump's attorney Michael Cohen learned that Daniels had shared her story with a magazine, a stranger approached her in a Las Vegas parking lot, the porn star told Anderson Cooper on the CBS show.
Daniels, who was heading into a fitness class, was getting her infant daughter out of a car seat, along with a diaper bag.
"A guy walked up on me and said to me, 'Leave Trump alone _ forget the story,' and then he leaned around and looked at my daughter," Daniels said.
"That's a beautiful little girl," she recalled the man telling her. "It'd be a shame if something happened to her mom."
"You took it as a direct threat?" Cooper asked.
"Absolutely," she responded. "I was rattled. I remember going into the workout class, and my hands are shaking so much, I was afraid I was going to drop her."
Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, said she never saw the man again, but would easily recognize him if she did. She said she was too scared to report the incident to the police.
The magazine, In Touch, did not publish Daniels' story until January 2018, after the Wall Street Journal reported that Cohen had arranged to pay her $130,000 just before the November 2016 presidential election in a deal that required her to keep quiet about the alleged affair.
President Trump's representatives have denied that he had an extramarital relationship with Daniels, who told CBS she had sex with Trump in 2006.
Daniels told CBS that she accepted the hush-money deal out of concern for her family's safety.
"I did not want my family and my child exposed to all the things that she's being exposed to right now, because everything that I was afraid of coming out has come out anyway, and guess what _ I don't have a million dollars," she said.
She also said she was pressured by her former attorney and former business manager to sign statements released by Cohen in which she denied having an affair with Trump.
"They made it sound like I had no choice," she said.
"You thought there would be some sort of legal repercussion if you didn't sign it?" Cooper asked.
"Correct," Daniels responded. "As a matter of fact, the exact sentence used was, 'They can make your life hell in many different ways.' "
Daniels offered some explicit details of her alleged tryst with Trump. When they met at a Lake Tahoe golf tournament in 2006, she said, she met him for dinner at his hotel suite, where Trump showed off a magazine with his photo on the cover.
"Someone should take that magazine and spank you with it," she recalled telling him.
"You wouldn't," he said, according to Daniels.
"I was like 'turn around, drop 'em,' " she said.
"You told Donald Trump to turn around and take off his pants?" Cooper asked.
"Yes. So he turned around and pulled his pants down a little _ you know, had underwear on and stuff, and I just gave him a couple swats."
At the time, Daniels was 27 and Trump was 60. She remembered Trump telling her, "You are special. You remind me of my daughter."
Trump told her he would try to get her a role on "The Apprentice," but that never came through, Daniels said.
Daniels, now 39, is the second woman in less than a week to talk on national television about having an affair with Trump in the early years of his marriage to Melania Trump, his third wife.
On Thursday, former Playboy model Karen McDougal told Cooper on CNN that she had a 10-month love affair with Trump around the same time as Daniels.
McDougal, 47, said she and Trump enjoyed at least five rendezvous a month in California, New York and New Jersey until, overcome with guilt, she cut it off. During the interview, McDougal apologized to the first lady.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump allies paid Daniels and McDougal to keep quiet about their allegations of having extramarital affairs with Trump. Both are now suing to break their confidentiality agreements, saying they were tricked into the deals.
Trump ignored reporters' shouted questions about Daniels on Sunday evening as he walked into the South Portico of the White House after a weekend getaway at his estate in Palm Beach, Fla.
Trump's silence marks a stark contrast to his combative rhetoric in the campaign's closing days, when he threatened to sue more than a dozen women who accused him of sexual misconduct and called them liars.
Trump never took any of the women to court, but one of them, former "Apprentice" contestant Summer Zervos, is suing him for defamation.
His lawyers say Daniels has breached the confidentiality agreement that she signed 11 days before the November 2016 election in return for $130,000.
As Daniels seeks a court order voiding the pact, Trump's lawyers are moving to get the lawsuit dismissed. They are trying to force Daniels to go to secret arbitration proceedings, as the agreement required, and pay as much as $20 million in damages to Trump.
Her "60 Minutes" interview could increase the amount; the contract requires Daniels to pay Trump $1 million each time she violates its terms.
Daniels' attorney, Michael Avenatti, cautioned Trump and his lawyers last week to be "very, very careful" in responding to Daniels' comments to CBS.
He tweeted a photograph of a DVD, telling CNN it was a "warning shot" putting the Trump legal team on notice that it contains evidence substantiating Daniels' relationship with Trump.
"The '60 Minutes' interview is not the end by any stretch of the imagination," Avenatti said.
