- Bombshells in Peacock's "Stormy," out Monday, include that she owes Trump $600,000 in legal fees.
- She says Trump "cornered" her into sex and that she signed an NDA so "he could not have me killed."
- Trump's hush-money lawyers are now crying foul over the "extraordinarily prejudicial" documentary.
Adult film actor Stormy Daniels drops so many bombshells in the smart, surprisingly moving documentary, "Stormy," that it's no wonder former President Donald Trump's "hush money" case lawyers are now raging against it.
Trump "cornered" her into sex in his Lake Tahoe hotel suite, she says in the Peacock film, in perhaps her most controversial description yet of the night they met in 2006.
Trump has repeatedly and consistently denied having sex with Stormy.
"I don't remember how I got on the bed, and then the next thing I know, he was humping away and telling me how great I was," Daniels says in the film.
"It was awful. But I didn't say 'No.'"
Daniels signed an NDA — the 2016 "hush money" agreement at the center of Trump's upcoming Manhattan criminal trial — to create a paper trail linking their names, she also says in the film, "so that he could not have me killed."
And in its most surprising bombshell, the film reveals that the $293,000 in legal fees she was ordered to pay Trump five years ago — unfairly, she contends — has grown to more than $600,000 thanks to accumulated interest.
She says she'd go to prison before paying him a dime.
"I don't know if I'm so much a warrior, or —" she tells the camera. She pauses before adding, "Out of fucks. I'm out of fucks."
'Unacceptable'
"Extraordinarily prejudicial," Trump's lawyers called the film in defense filings made public this week.
"Unacceptable," they said of its Peacock premiere date, which is Monday, Daniels' 45th birthday.
Trump's lawyers cite the premiere date as one of the strongest arguments for delaying the hush money trial, which was originally set to begin Monday, March 25 — exactly one week after the Peacock premiere.
Earlier this month, Trump's lawyers had asked the judge to push the trial back at least 90 days, in part because the premiere "would cause extraordinarily prejudicial — and unacceptable — pretrial publicity on the current schedule."
(On Friday, the judge agreed to a far shorter delay, telling both sides that he will likely set a mid-April trial start date.)
There is also their client to consider, Trump's lawyers said, in the delay request made public Thursday.
Trump needs to take his own look at "Stormy," they said.
"President Trump requires additional time to review" the documentary, the filing said. "And the Court must allow additional time for the prejudice from its release to abate prior to commencing jury selection."
Trump's lawyers are meanwhile asking that Daniels — given name Stephanie Clifford — be barred from testifying at the hush-money trial. The judge has yet to rule on that request.
"She seeks to tell contrived stories with salacious details of events she claimed occurred nearly 20 years ago," Trump's lawyers complained in court papers last month, "which have no place at a trial involving the types of charges at issue."
Prosecutors said this week that they agree to a brief trial delay due to more than 80,000 pages of potential evidence being turned over only this month by federal prosecutors. The evidence concerns the feds' 2018 prosecution of key hush-money witness Michael Cohen.
Under New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan's newly updated schedule, the trial could now last through Memorial Day week.
Coincidental timing
The filmmakers behind "Stormy" say the Peacock premiere was never intentionally planned with that original March 25 trial date in mind.
They did push to premiere the film at South by Southwest on March 8. Premiering it on Peacock 10 days later just made sense, said producer Erin Lee Carr.
"We in no way wanted to inform any jury member," Carr told Business Insider.
"It's really about the American public watching what happened to this woman and the consequences that she bears as a result of this."
Daniels had no editorial control over the documentary and was not paid for her time on camera, Carr said.
Throughout the film, Seth Rogen, Jimmy Kimmel, several journalists, and many of Daniels' friends and family members offer sympathetic takes on her life story and on the ongoing aftermath of her public accusations against Trump.
No one was paid for their interviews, Carr said, though the filmmakers did pay to option Daniels' 2018 memoir, "Full Disclosure."
'I was 9 years old again'
Daniels reveals in the film, quite poignantly and for the first time, that while growing up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, she was repeatedly abused by a much-older neighbor. She was nine years old.
"It wasn't rape in any sense," she says in the documentary about her brief encounter with Trump two decades later, when she was 27, and he was 60 — and married to Melania Trump, who had given birth to their son, Barron, just four months prior.
"I didn't say no," she says of Trump's advance, "because I was 9 years old again."
Daniels also tells on camera a story she's told before, including to 20 million viewers on "60 Minutes" in 2018. It's her story about what happened the first time she considered spilling her Trump tea publicly, in 2011, to In Touch magazine.
Shortly after Michael Cohen, Trump's then-attorney and "fixer," threatened the magazine with legal action — and the story was spiked — Daniels was threatened by a man in the parking lot of her gym, she has said.
"It'd be a shame if something happened to her mom," the stranger said, gesturing toward her then-infant daughter. "Leave Trump alone. Forget the story," she says the man warned.
'Horseface' versus 'Tiny'
Five years would pass before she again shopped her salacious story around, offering it to the National Enquirer in 2016, when, to her surprise, she saw he was running for president.
But she was also "terrified" of what would happen to herself and her family, she says in the film.
She signed the NDA Cohen gave her in part because she saw it as a paper trail linking her to Trump "so that he could not have me killed," she says in the documentary.
Daniels says she was inundated with death threats when the Wall Street Journal revealed the existence of the NDA two years later, in 2018, just a year into Trump's presidency.
In the six years that have followed, she's braved an online onslaught of vile, sadistic death threats and survived ribald public Twitter battles with Trump, in which he'd call her "Horseface" and she'd call him "Tiny."
Recently, one of her horses was shot with a rubber bullet, she reveals in the documentary.
Daniels has weathered "Really scary threats, and also people attacking her daughter recently" on social media, the documentary's director, Sarah Gibson, told Business Insider.
Then why the TV appearances? Why write a memoir? Why embark on a "Make America Horny Again" tour of strip club appearances? Even on Monday, when the documentary hits the small screen, Daniels is charging between $25 and $100 a ticket for a watch party she's hosting at a Brooklyn nightclub.
Threats aside, she still has a mortgage to pay and a daughter to support, Daniels explains in the film. "If you drive an ice cream truck, and you don't drive your ice cream truck the week of the heat wave, you're an idiot," she says.
Daniels has lost much more — financially and emotionally — than she could ever easily recoup, the filmmakers told BI.
"She's a true American, and she wants to support her family," Gibson told BI.
"And to me, that was so powerful. Say whatever you will about her going on tour and dancing in the wake of the Trump news breaking" in 2018, Gibson added.
"But she lost a lot of her other work at that point," the director said of Daniels, who had been directing a dozen or more adult films a year.
"A lot of her directing gigs went away," Gibson said. "That strip club tour really helped save her economic situation."
More than $900,000 in losses
Daniels' former lawyer, Michael Avenatti — currently serving a 14-year prison sentence — never paid her back for the $300,000 he stole from her, the filmmakers said.
Avenatti also left Daniels on the hook for what's now grown, with interest, to $600,000 in legal fees she still owes Trump after losing a defamation lawsuit against him, they said. Daniels says in the film that Avenatti filed the lawsuit on her behalf but without her permission.
"It's a complete tragedy," said Carr. "She's not some insanely rich person that got wealthy from doing this. She is somebody that has fought this system and lost, and is bearing the consequences."
Daniels' story, which is still unfolding, is "not about sex anymore, it's about power," Carr added. "It's about control, and it's about how Donald Trump still has Stormy Daniels under control because of this financial penalty, and the American justice system is aiding and abetting that."