So far, Susan Necheles’s cross-examination of Stormy Daniels feels a little star-crossed, and not just because the jury in the Trump hush money trial surely noticed when the lawyer accidentally called the CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin “Jeff Daniels” and twice referred to Gina Rodriguez, Stormy Daniels’s talent agent, as “Geena Davis.”
Strangely enough, Daniels stood up better under cross than her former attorney, Keith Davidson, did last week. In certain ways, she is doing even better on cross-examination — which continues on Thursday — than she did on direct examination by the prosecution in the morning.
On direct, Daniels was admonished by the judge for oversharing and she may have sold her narrative so hard that it came across as canned. On cross, she didn’t fall into Necheles’s attempted traps or let the harsh questions intimidate her. With her hardscrabble background still in the minds of jurors, Daniels’s defiance on the stand seemed more spunky than defensive.
And Necheles went down some useless byways. She spent too much time trying to tarnish Daniels for not paying Donald Trump the legal fees a court awarded him in frivolous civil suit that her lawyer at the time, the now imprisoned Michael Avenatti, persuaded her to bring against him.
When Necheles pressed Daniels on whether she really went to exercise class after a “supposed” encounter with a threatening man in a parking lot, it felt like a reach. Same for when she quibbled with Daniels’s estimate of the length of an interview.
Necheles was more successful in pushing Daniels on her changing stories about whether she and Trump had sex. But Daniels had explanations — some more convincing than others — for the zigzagging in interviews and statements by her lawyers.
Necheles practically shouted, “You were looking to extort money from President Trump, right?”
“False!” Daniels said with a vigor that obscured whatever her true motive might have been.
Later, Necheles charged, “Your whole story is made up, isn’t it?”
“No, none of it is made up,” Daniels replied.
Jurors probably won’t buy “none of it” but I don’t see them rejecting Daniels’s “whole story.” Nonetheless, when she testifies on Thursday, she is likely to confirm that she had no connection to the falsification of business records at the heart of the case.
And that renders Stormy Daniels in the witness box little more than a circus sideshow.