Stormy Daniels

Former President Donald Trump was indicted in New York City on Thursday on criminal charges arising from alleged hush money paid to adult film actress ...

Trump responded on Twitter to the release of the sketch, writing: "A sketch years later about a nonexistent man. Daniels sued Trump and Cohen seeking to have the agreement invalidated. Daniels has said she was introduced to Trump in July 2006 at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe. Daniels said he wanted to have sex again at the hotel but she declined. Daniels has said she had a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006, the year after he married his third wife Melania and more than a decade before the businessman-turned-politician - at the time known for a popular reality TV show - became president. She has been a well-known personality for more than two decades in the adult film business, appearing in and directing numerous videos.

After 50 years of tangling with the legal system, Donald Trump has been indicted. Why is this case leading to his first criminal charges?

The Justice Department has a long-standing practice of not charging a sitting President with a crime. Bragg has moved forward on a separate Trump-related case, but has not directly charged Trump with a crime in that proceeding. Bragg beat out seven candidates in the Democratic primary for Manhattan District Attorney in 2021, and then easily won in the general election. Previously, he was a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York and the deputy chief in the state attorney general’s office. Bragg is the first Black man to be elected as Manhattan district attorney in the 220-year history of the office. While in the state attorney general’s office, Bragg was part of lawsuits against the Donald J. Trump is trying to use his status as a 2024 presidential candidate to say that Bragg is targeting him for political reasons. Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen says that Trump reimbursed him for the hush money payment to Daniels in order to stop her from going public before the election with her account of an alleged affair with Trump. Cohen’s 2018 guilty plea for campaign finance violations in relation to the hush money payment has given prosecutors a clear trail of evidence to follow. It has to do with the timing of the work of various grand juries,” says Timothy Naftali, a historian at New York University and former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, recently told TIME. Cohen has also said that Trump knew about the details of the payment and why it was being made. Trump’s response did not mention his public and well-documented efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, was unaware of Trump's indictment for nearly two hours. "She was surprised," her lawyer said.

“It really is a testament, truly, to our constitutional system.” “I think it's a tragedy to see someone who has been a former president and leader of this country to be criminally charged,” he added. “But on behalf of Stormy and honestly myself, there's no joy in seeing the man indicted.” She returned home to literally hundreds of messages and called her [longtime lawyer Clark Brewster](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/03/18/what-we-know-donald-trump-indictment/11498610002/) to ask what was up. So from that perspective, there's a degree of feeling like the system is working.” Those allegations, and claims that Trump paid her $130,000 for her silence just days before the 2016 election, first came to light after Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton in the hard-fought race.