Former US President Donald Trump has snapped many inglorious firsts. He was the first head of state in the long history of the United States to face impeachment twice. He was also the first US President to incite an angry mob to storm the Capitol. And now he is the first US President to face charges in a criminal case.

On Thursday it was announced that the responsible grand jury in New York had voted to indict Trump. The case concerns hush money payments to former porn actress Stormy Daniels. Trump’s ex-attorney Michael Cohen, who has since turned his back on him and is working with authorities, paid Daniels $130,000 not to speak publicly about an alleged affair with Donald Trump in 2006. Trump is said to have later compensated Cohen for this. Hush money payments aren’t illegal per se, but Trump may have violated campaign finance laws by declaring the money to be legal fees.

Trump himself denies an affair, but not that money flowed. However, the payment is said to have been deliberately miscalculated in order to cover up the reason, according to the allegations. Who is the woman at the center of the explosive case?

Born in 1979, Stormy Daniels’ real name is Stephanie Clifford. As she told US media, she grew up in the capital of the US state of Louisana, Baton Rouge. She never had a good relationship with her mother and started earning extra money by working in Stip Clubs as early as high school. A little later she shot her first erotic films as an actress, later also as a producer and director.

In 2006, she met Donald Trump by chance at a golf tournament on Lake Tahoe and, according to her, later met with him in a hotel room for consensual sex. After that, she claims to have been in contact with him for several months. Not long before the alleged affair, Trump had married his current wife, Melania. Their son Barron was only a few months old at the time.

Trump denies the sexual intercourse and speaks of “false and blackmailing allegations”. However, he does not deny the hush money payments. These are not an admission of guilt and are quite common among rich and famous people, he argued years ago on Twitter.

Daniels had already given the gossip magazine “Intouch” an interview about the alleged sex with Trump in 2011. Five years later, in the middle of the US election campaign, she is said to have negotiated with US broadcasters about telling her story on TV. After the money flowed, there was no such interview.

In early 2018, the “Wall Street Journal” reported on the payments and catapulted Stormy Daniels into the public eye. She published a book in which she went into detail about Trump’s privates and appeared at several porn fairs to promote herself and her work. Among other things, she was a guest at the Berlin Venus in 2018. She also toured numerous US strip clubs on her so-called “Make America Horny Again” tour. A nod to Trump’s famous campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

In an interview with “60 Minutes” she reported again in 2018 on the alleged affair with Trump and said that she and her daughter had once been threatened by a stranger in a parking lot and that she had therefore felt compelled to agree to the hush money agreement sign.

In the same year, FBI agents seized numerous documents from Trump’s ex-lawyer Cohen’s office, which also had to do with the payments to Daniels.

In the meantime, she has sued Donald Trump for calling her statements on Twitter “fraud”. However, courts ruled in 2020 that these statements were covered by freedom of speech in the United States under the First Amendment.

On Thursday, Daniels thanked her supporters for their support following the indictment of Trump. “I got so many messages I can’t even reply…I don’t want to spill my champagne either,” she wrote on Twitter on Thursday evening (local time). She also gets requests for promotional items and autographs. A few more days should now be planned for shipping.

Daniels’ attorney Clark Brewster told CNN that she was not surprised at the charges but rather relieved. “It’s really a fight against his (Trump’s) denial of the truth and his story fabrication,” he added.

Sources: DPA, Reuters, “Guardian”,