Stormy Daniels’s memoir: Funny, vulgar, brash and believable.
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| Stormy Daniels speaks during a ceremony in her honor in West Hollywood, Calif., in May. (Mike Blake/Reuters) |
WASHINGTON POST
Stormy Daniels would like to set the record straight, and the first thing she wants you to know is that she didn’t want to be here. She hates public speaking. She kept the bad sex she had with Donald Trump a secret, even from her husband, and even after some of the people she loves most in the world begged her to come forward to save the republic. She’s not a gold digger or an attention seeker or a bimbo looking for her 15 minutes. And she’s definitely not a liar.
That is the current that runs through Daniels’s new book, “Full Disclosure,” which publishes Oct. 2. (The Washington Post obtained an early copy.) Daniels knows we’re all interested in the juicy bits about Trump, but she doesn’t get there until several chapters in, after detailing a dysfunctional childhood in Louisiana with an uninterested and then absent father and a mother who falls apart as a result. She is repeatedly raped at age 9 by a child molester, and when she finally tells a school counselor, her story isn’t believed. Her mother pretends it never happened, fearing that the assaults will be blamed on negligent parenting. Hers is a childhood marked by indifferent and sometimes callous adults, and she has to prove her basic worth again and again.
Daniels eventually finds solace in horseback riding, which helps her pull away from a life that felt inevitable, a theme she comes back to many times as she considers the absurdity of her current situation (“I should be living in a trailer back in Louisiana, with six kids and no teeth,” she writes in the book’s prologue, as she instead prepares to accept the keys to the city as West Hollywood proclaims Stormy Daniels Day). Her fixation on riding means she avoids drinking, drugs and sex, all parts of a normal teenage social life, but things that can short-circuit plans of escape for those lower on the socioeconomic rungs. “I would see yet another girl who lived around me suddenly pregnant and would say to myself silently, Can’t ride a horse if you’re pregnant.”
That focus also animates Daniels’s professional life, as she starts stripping in high school (focusing on consistent clients rather than gravitating to one-time big tippers), moves on to more-profitable stripping road shows and then tries the adult-film industry. She seeks to write and later direct adult films, and finds quick success.
She is ambitious and bright, and that comes through — she doesn’t just show us, she tells us, repeatedly mentioning that she graduated from a magnet high school, that she has a photographic memory and that she’s smarter than you think.
Her rags-to-riches story tacks a familiar course, but she got there via sex and brazen power-seeking — things women are not supposed to be quite so blatant about.
Now that she’s wealthy and famous, Daniels’s story should be one of redemption, wherein Stormy goes from hooker with a heart of gold to soft, maternal and quiet (to be clear, Daniels never worked as a prostitute, but her detractors paint her as such). She should find true meaning in motherhood; she should take on the polite trappings of the middle class.
Instead, she writes that pregnancy sucked, she got really fat, and she demanded that her husband do porn, too, so that if they ever got divorced he couldn’t use her job against her in a custody battle. She conceals the Trump fling from him. He struggles with mental health issues, and their marriage falls apart under the glare of the public eye. She clearly adores her daughter but also very obviously loves her job, and is proud of the success she’s had in her industry. Yes, she was raped as a little girl, but she maintains that didn’t drive her to porn.
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Now, the part you've been waiting for:
Trump’s bodyguard invites Daniels to dinner, which turns out to be an invitation to Trump’s penthouse, she writes, in a description of alleged events that Daniels has disclosed previously but which in the book are rendered with new and lurid detail. She describes Trump’s penis as “smaller than average” but “not freakishly small.”
“He knows he has an unusual penis,” Daniels writes. “It has a huge mushroom head. Like a toadstool…
“I lay there, annoyed that I was getting f**ked by a guy with Yeti pubes and a dick like the mushroom character in Mario Kart…
“It may have been the least impressive sex I’d ever had, but clearly, he didn’t share that opinion.”