For more than seven hours this week, the woman whose encounter with Donald J. Trump resulted in his criminal trial years later told her side of the story. On Thursday, she returned to defend that account.
The woman, Stormy Daniels, answered questions from Manhattan prosecutors for several hours Tuesday before Mr. Trump’s lawyers began cross-examining her and continued on Thursday. Defense lawyers grilled her about inconsistencies in her account and others she has given in the past, and suggested that Ms. Daniels was motivated by money in divulging it.
Ms. Daniels began her testimony this week by describing how she and Mr. Trump met, a now-infamous encounter just off a fairway in Lake Tahoe, Nev., during a celebrity golf tournament in July 2006.
Ms. Daniels, a porn star, had been greeting people who strolled through a tent on the course that had been sponsored by her employer, the film company Wicked Pictures. One was Mr. Trump, the real estate mogul whose fame had skyrocketed as a result of his hosting the reality television show “The Apprentice.”
He said hello to her and posed for a picture, Ms. Daniels said on Tuesday in intense and sometimes graphic testimony delivered mere feet from Mr. Trump, during the first criminal trial of a former American president.
Ms. Daniels said their conversation in the tent was brief — he remarked on her intelligence, evident because she not only starred in films but also directed them, she said.
After that encounter, his bodyguard, Keith Schiller, told Ms. Daniels that Mr. Trump would like to have dinner with her, she said. Mr. Schiller saved her phone number, she said. Her publicist advised her to accept the invitation, noting: “What could possibly go wrong?”
She was 27. He was 60, and had a newborn son with his wife, Melania. They had been married a little more than a year.
Much of Ms. Daniels’s story has been public for years, first in news reports about a year after Mr. Trump moved into the White House, and later by her own telling in television interviews and her 2018 book, “Full Disclosure.”
Her account did not directly give rise to the 34 felony charges against Mr. Trump. Instead, they resulted from Mr. Trump’s reimbursement of the $130,000 in hush money that Michael D. Cohen, the former president’s fixer and personal lawyer, paid to Ms. Daniels in the days before the 2016 election.
Prosecutors say that the payments to Mr. Cohen were purposely mislabeled within the Trump Organization as “legal expenses,” a falsification of business records intended to conceal the deal.
On the night in question, Ms. Daniels said, she arrived at Mr. Trump’s suite on a penthouse floor of the Harrah’s Lake Tahoe Hotel, a few blocks from the lakeside golf course. Mr. Schiller greeted her outside the room, the door cracked open for her entry, she said.
Mr. Trump was wearing “silk or satin” sleepwear, Ms. Daniels testified; after she cracked a joke — “Does Mr. Hefner know you stole his pajamas?” — he changed his clothes.
With the sun still shining through the windows, they began to talk about their lives, she testified, with Mr. Trump taking a particular interest in the business side of her career. Were there unions? Did she get health insurance? Did she worry about sexually transmitted diseases? Was she ever tested? (Every 30 days, she said.)
She could not fully answer most of his questions because he kept cutting her off, she said on the witness stand. She told him he was arrogant and deserved punishment: a spanking, she said. He handed her a rolled-up magazine and she delivered the spanking.
He said she reminded him of his daughter Ivanka, who was 25 at the time, Ms. Daniels testified. He also said she would be a good contestant on his reality show and that it could lead to other opportunities in the entertainment business. (She never appeared on the show.)
At one point, she wandered around the suite, she said, and ended up in the bathroom. She touched up her lipstick and noticed his toiletry bag, with Old Spice and a manicure set in all gold. When she exited, he had changed clothes again, she said. He lay on the bed in boxers and a T-shirt.
Ms. Daniels said her memory of what happened next was not clear — she thought she had blacked out, though she said she had not been under the influence of drugs or alcohol — but that she remembered ending up on the bed with Mr. Trump, most of her clothes and her shoes off. It was dark outside by then, and she stared at the ceiling.
“I didn’t know how I got there,” she recalled thinking in the moment. “I was trying to think about anything other than what was happening there.”
Mr. Trump has repeatedly denied that he had sex with Ms. Daniels. On cross-examination, one of his lawyers, Susan Necheles, suggested that Ms. Daniels was a liar who had made up her story to extract cash from Mr. Trump. Ms. Daniels confirmed that her book contract was $800,000.
“That story has made you a lot of money, right?” Ms. Necheles said. “It has also cost me a lot of money,” Ms. Daniels replied.
On Thursday, Ms. Necheles noted that Ms. Daniels still owed about $560,000 in legal fees to Mr. Trump from a 2018 defamation suit she filed that was dismissed. Ms. Daniels said on the stand that her attorney at the time, Michael Avenatti, filed that suit against her wishes. She also acknowledged that she wrote on social media in 2022, “I will go to jail before I pay a penny.”
In a hostile exchange on Thursday, Ms. Necheles pushed Ms. Daniels about how she could say she wanted to stay silent but also wanted to “publicly” say she had a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump. Ms. Daniels replied: “Nobody would ever want to” say that publicly.
