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Stormy Daniels goes on the offensive on Twitter: “People DO care that he lied”

The porn actress’s statements were some of her boldest yet about the alleged affair with Donald Trump.

The AVN Awards At Mandalay Bay - Arrivals Ethan Miller/Getty Images
Jen Kirby is a senior foreign and national security reporter at Vox, where she covers global instability.

Adult film actress Stormy Daniels fired back at a Twitter troll on Tuesday, and, in doing so, left America with an image it might prefer to forget.

A Twitter user suggested to Daniels, “why don’t you just disappear. No one cares you were a slut and slept with POTUS 12 yrs ago.” Daniels responded with a provocative tweet about her alleged affair with Trump in 2006. “Technically I didn’t sleep with POTUS 12 years ago. There was no sleeping (hehe) and he was just a goofy reality TV star.”

“But I digress,” she added. “People DO care that he lied about it, had me bullied, broke laws to cover it up, etc.”

Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, is at the center of an evolving scandal involving the president. Donald Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 before the 2016 election in exchange for her silence about an alleged 2006 affair. Daniels, however, is now suing to get out of that “hush agreement,” claiming it is invalid because Trump never signed it.

Cohen has said he paid Daniels with his own money, and the White House has denied Trump had an affair with Stormy Daniels or $130,000 in hush money. But on Friday, Trump’s attorneys filed court papers on Friday included a claim that Daniels violated her nondisclosure agreement at least 20 times — which could open her up to $20 million in potential damages.

Daniels’s Twitter response is, coy language aside, one of her boldest pronouncements yet about the alleged encounter with Trump since the Wall Street Journal first reported this story in January. It also raises questions about the circumstances surrounding the $130,000 payment, and how Trump, or those closest to him, tried to keep Daniels from speaking out publicly. Her allegation that Trump “lied about it, had her bullied, broke laws to cover it up” is a serious one.

Daniels is expected to tell at least some of her story on a primetime interview on 60 Minutes this Sunday. Her attorney, Michael Avenatti, teased the interview last week. “The fact is my client was physically threatened to stay silent about what she knew about Donald Trump,” he said. “The details surrounding that, she’s going to discuss on the 60 Minutes interview on March 25.”

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