A porn star had a racy tale about Trump. Why are we only learning about it now?
Several journalists surely knew who Stormy Daniels was in 2016, and it probably wasn't because they'd seen her in one of the many porn films she'd made.
The adult-film actress was on the radar of a number of mainstream news outlets in the waning days of the presidential campaign. Reporters from ABC, Fox News, the Daily Beast and Slate.com were pursuing a potentially explosive story: that Daniels had allegedly had an affair with Donald Trump in 2006, only months after Trump's wife, Melania, had given birth to their son, Barron.
Yet no one went with the story.
Given the importance and context of Daniels's story — on the heels of multiple sexual assault allegations against Trump and the controversy over his vulgar remarks on the "Access Hollywood" video — the question is, why? Why wasn't the story reported at the time, when it might have intensified questions surrounding Trump's character just before voters went to the polls?
Journalists say they held back because they couldn't independently corroborate key elements of Daniels's account, including in one instance from Daniels herself. The story, in other words, failed to rise to journalistic standards, never mind that it involved a man who regularly attacks the news media for lacking standards.
The story behind the story began to spill out only in the past week, touched off by a Wall Street Journal report about Michael Cohen, a lawyer for the Trump Organization. The Journal reported that Cohen arranged a $130,000 payment to Daniels a month before the election in 2016 in exchange for her silence about an alleged sexual relationship with Trump. Daniels, Cohen and the White House have denied any such relationship; she has also denied being paid "hush money" by Trump.
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