Like many viewers (including my colleague Christine Emba), I was struck by Stormy Daniels’ remarks on “60 Minutes” that she wound up engaging in a sexual encounter with Donald Trump because “I had it coming for making a bad decision for going to someone’s room alone.” I think the best way of showing how screwed up this is is to rewrite her account à la “Cat Person.”
“Shark Person”
Stormy met Donald on a weekend night in the middle of July 2006. He was there to play golf, and she was riding around the golf course in a golf cart as part of a promotion. They wound up riding from one place to another in a golf cart together. She could tell that he thought she was cute.
“I want to come talk to you later,” he told her.
Stormy enjoyed talking to interesting people. Her job that weekend was to appear in the gift room, and it would have been boring otherwise, and though she did not think Donald was cute, she thought it might be interesting to talk to him. He was tall, on the heavy side, with no beard, and he leaned forward slightly as though he were walking into a high wind. He was older, wearing a golf hat so she did not have to consider what his hair was doing, which she liked. The hat was red, with an insignia on it, like the coat of arms of an imaginary country, and underneath it his face was ruddy and flushed from a day of squinting into the sun.
He asked for her number and, surprising herself, she gave it to him. They agreed to have dinner that evening.
It was early evening, not yet dark, when she walked from her hotel to his hotel.
When she went inside, he was lounging in his pajamas, and she worried for the first time that she might have misread the interaction. In her mental picture of this evening, he was dressed to go to dinner and they were going to ride the elevator down together to a restaurant with brass railings and white tablecloths and steak, making small talk, but instead he was sprawled on his couch wearing pajama pants that looked like hand-me-downs from Hugh Hefner. She told him this, and he got upset, defensive, as though she was the one who had misread things.
“I thought we would just relax here,” he said.
They wound up eating in the room, because it became clear that they were not going to eat anywhere else. While they waited for the food he kept bringing the conversation back to himself and to his show, which was a reality TV competition, and to a magazine that he was on the cover of. The more he spoke, the more she became aware he thought this was a good technique to impress a woman — that he was genuinely trying to prove himself to her with this information; the knowledge of this vulnerability touched her. There was something affecting in the fact that, although he was much older than she was, he could still be so bad at something.
“Does this normally work for you?” she asked. He continued to try to tell her about the magazine, as though explaining the merits of the magazine with his face on the front cover would clear the impasse they had reached.
Her response seemed to surprise him, and she offered to spank him with one of the magazines. She rolled one up and gave him a couple of swats. After that he became someone different, more at ease. He asked her questions about herself. The evening grew to resemble the pleasant two hours that she had initially imagined, and she could see herself from a distance, this urbane and self-possessed woman with shiny blond hair, keeping The Donald on his toes. She could tell that she looked good, and that he was intrigued, and that his desire to have her appear on his television show was sincere, though she privately doubted anything would come of it, given her profession. He told her she reminded him of his daughter and she felt sad again, that this was the approach he thought he had perfected.
She asked if she could use the restroom.
“Sure,” he said. “It’s just through those double doors.”
The bathroom was inside the suite and she had to pass his bed to reach it. She was in there for some time, and when she came out, he had shifted locations and was sitting on the bed, perched, like a parakeet in loose-fitting pajamas.
It was obvious what he wanted. The thought of what it would require to correct his notion of what was about to happen seemed overwhelming. She was not physically attracted to him, but she was physically in a hotel room with him, and to have to explain to him that his equation was faulty — that her presence in his room, and the fact of the industry she worked in, did not mean that she had agreed to anything further — seemed exhausting. And it could be, as well, that he had operated with this equation for years, reverse-engineering this very setup from punchlines of jokes at which he laughed too hard, so that, in his mind, all that was required was to manufacture these conditions and that what happened next would then seem inevitable, and not the result of dozens — maybe hundreds — of indulgences on the behalf of women who were too tired or too curious or too anything else to correct it. So she consented. It was easier to consent than to have to wrestle with what it would mean if she did not consent and he persisted.
Afterward, he told her that she was great, that she had surprised him and that they needed to see each other again.
She rode the elevator alone. He had not given her his number, just his bodyguard’s, but he did call. He kept calling to update her about the TV show, even though she felt relatively sure that this appearance he was going to set up would never materialize. When he called she would put him on speakerphone and her friends would express varying degrees of excitement and alarm at the fact that she was in touch with this man, of all men, that something had happened between them.
The next time they saw one another was in a bungalow where he was watching a documentary about sharks. He hated sharks, he told her. Sharks were an equation that could only have one solution: You were in the water with them, and they ate you. Therefore you had to kill them.
She did not ask if he had ever seen a shark in person, if every idea he had about how to interact with sharks was something he had gotten from a movie, or a remark he had overheard someone make once and never thought to question. They sat there for an hour watching the battleship and the sharks swarming around it and he touched her leg and stroked her hair. She knew what would happen if she said yes to the implied question but instead she waited for him to ask the question, which he never did, so she took her purse and said she had to go and went away and left him with the sharks.
At first she thought maybe she would tell people the story of what happened, but they threatened her and offered her money not to, and so she said it had not happened at all. Then he became the president and it all became very complicated. She discovered he had never signed the agreement and when she told her story she was called a liar. She appeared on television and the story that had never made it into print was suddenly everywhere.
And the texts started to pour in. And the threats. And the tweets, though not from him.
“Hi are you the American whore who wont keep your legs shut or your mouth”
“Yes,” she wrote back. “I am. Nice to meet ya!”
On “60 Minutes,” Anderson Cooper asked her what had happened, and she got to tell him about the magazine and he asked her if she had anything she wanted to say to Donald if he were watching right then, sitting perched on the edge of a bed with his hair and his milkshake and all the questions she knew from the “Access Hollywood” tape that he never bothered asking.
“He knows,” she said, “I’m telling the truth.”
Alexandra Petri | The Washington Post
Follow Alexandra Petri on Twitter, @petridishes.