Stormy Daniels said the fallout from Donald Trump’s hush-money scandal “physically destroyed” her, sharing that she had a miscarriage after the former president was indicted last March.
In an episode that aired Thursday, Daniels told the Daily Mail’s podcast “Everything I Know About Me” that she paid an emotional and physical toll after reports first surfaced in 2018 that she’d had an affair with Trump and that he’d tried to buy her silence just before the 2016 election.
While Daniels said she faced “frivolous” threats after the story initially broke, the harassment reached a frightening level last year when Trump was indicted for his scheme to pay Daniels to keep her from sharing her story.
“When the indictment happened last year, not only did I have a miscarriage, but I haven’t had a period since,” she told the podcast. “Like, it has physically destroyed me.”
Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, said she had put the scandal behind her, only for the 2023 charges to bring chaos back into her life.
“I’d kind of forgotten all of this stuff was going on, it had finally gotten quiet, you know,” she explained. “I got married, I got back to directing, I’d returned to the adult industry, everything was kind of getting back to normal.”
“And of course, here comes Donald Trump to fuck shit up again,” Daniels said, adding, “Although this time he got a little more fucked up than I did.”
At the end of May, Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts stemming from the hush-money scheme.
Lorenzo Bevilaqua via Getty Images
After the initial indictment, Daniels said the blowback was so severe that it made her fear for her and her family’s safety.
“This time around, it was maybe less threats, but they were darker, they were real, they were like, doing the due diligence to find out where I live,” she recounted.
“Sending me [an] address or a picture of my house; telling me they were going to rape and murder me; they were going to tie my daughter up in graphic detail and watch her, make her watch them rape me.”
Earlier this month, during an interview with Rachel Maddow, the adult film actor and director said she worries that the harassment will only get “more bold” if Trump returns to office.
“I think he will try and make even more of an example out of me,” she told Maddow, adding that Trump followers might even think that “if they do something, then he’ll pardon them.”