From their alleged tryst at Lake Tahoe to the lawsuit today.

On January 12, 2018, the Wall Street Journal broke what appeared to be just another initially outrageous and quickly forgotten Donald Trump scandal.

The president, the Journal’s Michael Rothfeld and Joe Palazzolo reported, had paid porn performer/director Stormy Daniels (birth name Stephanie Clifford) $130,000 in October 2016 as part of a nondisclosure agreement. Daniels, they wrote, had “privately alleged” that she had a “sexual encounter” with Trump in July 2006 following a celebrity golf tournament at Lake Tahoe.

Normally, a president’s past affair with an adult film star would dominate news coverage. But this all happened the week that Trump referred to Haiti, El Salvador, and seemingly all countries in Africa as “shithole” countries, and the intervening months saw news coverage dominated by everything from the Parkland school shooting to Trump’s historic agreement to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un to the omnibus spending bill. It would’ve been understandable if “Donald Trump commits adultery” faded away as a story.

But it didn’t. The Stormy Daniels affair has had remarkable staying power, both because, after weeks of staying quiet, Daniels herself has decided she wants to tell her story, and because Trump and his legal team are going to extraordinary lengths to silence her, including demanding $20 million for violations of the nondisclosure agreement she and her legal team have allegedly already committed. The story will only gain traction once Daniels’s interview with 60 Minutes’ Anderson Cooper is broadcast this Sunday:


The slow progression of the scandal, however, has made its various twists and turns a bit difficult to follow. Here is everything you need to know about Daniels and Trump’s alleged affair, the “hush agreement” meant to silence her, and her subsequent legal fight to tell her story.

What allegedly occurred in Lake Tahoe
From July 13 to 16, 2006, the Edgewood Tahoe Golf Course hosted the American Century Championship celebrity golf tournament, whose contestants included hockey legend Mario Lemieux, football players Drew Brees and Ben Roethlisberger, talk show host Maury Povich, comedians Ray Romano and Kevin Nealon, former Vice President Dan Quayle, and, of course, Donald Trump. Trump placed 62nd out of 80.

During this tournament, Trump (who married Melania Trump about 18 months earlier, and whose son Barron had been born in March) allegedly propositioned or had sex with at least four women, three of them adult film actresses and the fourth a Playboy model.

jessica drake (who prefers her name be lowercase) says she met Trump in the Celebrity Gift Room “early in the morning” and gave him her phone number. Later that evening, she says, he invited her to his room, and she brought two friends with her. There, she claims, he groped and kissed each of them without consent and conducted what “felt like an interview” while wearing pajamas. Later that night, he offered drake money to come back to his room, and after she refused, she got another call, from either Trump or another man working on his behalf (she couldn’t tell), offering $10,000. She declined.

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