Let’s acknowledge what Stormy Daniels did.
Let’s acknowledge what Stormy Daniels did.
I t’s not as though he was the innocent victim, but when Donald Trump and his legal team say that Stormy Daniels extorted him, they are right.
From one perspective, this is another perversity of the case — Stormy Daniels engaged in a kind of extortion, and yet Trump is the one the authorities have tried their utmost to nail to the wall.
There’s been a lot of focus on the timing of the $130,000 payment to Daniels near the end of the 2016 campaign. Trump’s pursuers say this shows how the hush money was all about making the story go away right before the election. But the timing was also a function of Daniels and her side realizing that right after the release of the Access Hollywood tape was the point of maximum leverage to make an extortionate demand.
“Pay me or I will expose you” is undoubtedly a form of blackmail. Now, there’s a fuzzy line between negotiations toward a deal involving a payment in exchange for a non-disclosure agreement, which happens all the time, and illegal threats.
Make no mistake, though, the difference between what Stormy Daniels was doing in 2016 and what gets people prosecuted for extortion is one of degree, not of kind.
The prosecutor Mark Pomerantz, who ended up quitting Bragg’s office to write a book making the case for prosecuting Trump, at one point contemplated using the idea that Daniels extorted Trump against him, bizarrely enough. “If Daniels had been extorting Trump,” Reuters explains, “then the money could be considered criminal proceeds and efforts to conceal that it came from Trump could constitute money laundering.”
The cases of extortion involving illicit affairs that show up in the press tend to involve prostitutes or strippers who threaten to use a tape or some other evidence to expose a john, and typically engage in harassment or other threats related to their demands.
In a typical case, a couple of years ago, a prostitute in the St. Louis area tried to get $15,000 from a married man by threatening to post a secret recording of their tryst with another woman. She got three payments of $2,200 out of him, but when she wanted more and posted the video, he went to the FBI.
In Pennsylvania not too long ago, a prostitute was charged with blackmailing the president of the Pennsylvania Bar Association.
The Eliot Spitzer scandal involved an extortion scheme. One of the hookers threatened to expose him to the public and his family, and he regularly paid her off between 2014 and 2016 to the tune of $400,000. She was charged with blackmail, and ended up pleading guilty to another charge, bringing the case to a close.
Celebrities are flypaper for extortion plots. Kevin Hart was extorted (in a murky case). So was Dana White. So was Mark Jackson. So was Danny Cipriani, an English soccer player.
Of course, one of the lessons here is that the prostitute, stripper, or porn star with whom someone has an affair may be less than totally reliable.
The Stormy Daniels demand wasn’t as sleazy or coercive as those that result in extortion charges, and she had a lawyer helping in her effort to pressure Trump. (Although lawyers can run afoul of extortion law, as former Daniels lawyer Michael Avenatti spectacularly demonstrated during his self-immolation; the line between tough bargaining and blackmail is a contested one.)
And Trump and his allies, in effect, legitimated the extortionate demands made against him by planning for them, bargaining over them, and paying them off without a peep to the authorities or any complaint until well after the fact.
It takes two to tango — the women made the demands, and Trump paid up because it was worth it to him to make these stories go away.
Again, he was no victim, but the women who cashed in were no victims, or saints, either.
“I don’t think that his crimes against me are worthy of incarceration,” Stormy Daniels told Piers Morgan in an interview.
How high-minded. But what crimes is she thinking of? Daniels threatened Trump with exposure, got a handsome payoff to keep quiet, and ended up talking anyway.
That’s pretty much a master class in how to make an extortionate demand work.