Defiant Stormy Daniels comes face to face with Trump in court for tense testimony about ‘jump scare’ hotel sex

Stormy Daniels didn’t want to meet Donald Trump for dinner in 2006, she told a Manhattan courtroom on Tuesday. A friend convinced her.

“It’ll make a great story,” she said, according to Ms Daniels. “What could possibly go wrong?”

Nearly 18 years later, the adult film star at the centre of the first-ever criminal trial of an American president testified for more than four hours, detailing her alleged sexual encounter in front of a judge and a jury, Mr Trump’s son, and Mr Trump himself, who repeatedly shook his head in disbelief.

The former president is criminally charged with falsifying business records as part of an alleged cover-up scheme to hide reimbursement payments to his then-lawyer Michael Cohen, who wired Ms Daniels $130,000 for her silence just weeks before the 2016 presidential election.

In a pair of thick-framed glasses, Ms Daniels sat several feet away from Mr Trump, who sank in his chair and scowled or closed his eyes and muttered under his breath while she detailed a tryst she has similarly described before, including salacious details that Mr Trump’s attorneys argued were grounds for a mistrial.

But her account of the story is “precisely what the defendant did not want to become public,” according to Assistant District Attorney Susan Hoffinger.

At one point, Mr Trump was “cursing audibly” in disgust, according to New York Justice Juan Merchan.

“I understand that your client is upset at this poin,” he told Mr Trump’s attorneys during an off-mic sidebar conversation, according to a court transript, “but he is cursing audibly and he is shaking his head visually and that’s contemptuous. It has the potential to intimidate the witness and the jury can see that.”

Ms Daniels’ vivid testimony – often spilling out