UNKNOWNS: "What Happened to Daniels," the headline said!

SATURDAY, MAY 18, 2024

It was trafficking in unknowns: What actually happened to Stormy Daniels back in 2006?

We can't exactly answer that question. Beyond that, we can't say that voters should have been encouraged to explore the answer to that question in the fall of 2016.

Starting with the downfall of Candidate Hart in 1987, our presidential elections have increasingly turned on questions about who is, or has been, zoomin' who—on largely unanswerable questions about the (consensual) sexual conduct of some one of the major candidates.

Back when men (are said to have) fought on the plains outside Troy, this was the only topic which actually seemed to matter. Three thousand years later, our drift back toward this One Central Topic is a bit hard to ignore.

Who got to be married to Helen, radiance of woman, the most beautiful woman in the world? Back in the late Bronze Age, it was the only thing Achaean warriors seemed to care about!

They spent ten years waging war against Troy because they cared so much about this braindead question. And now, so too across Blue America, within our own atavistic tribe. 

For the record, we're speaking here of consensual sex, not of sexual assault. Within our defiantly unimpressive tribe, are we actually able to focus on much of anything else?

Last week, Stormy Daniels took to the witness stand in the puzzling Gotham trial of Candidate Donald J. Trump. At the web site of The Atlantic, this headline appeared atop a (largely) thoughtful essay by Lawfare's Quinta Jurecic:

What Happened to Stormy Daniels Is Not Salacious

From that headline, a reader might think that Jurecic actually knows what happened to Stormy Daniels on the one occasion in question, back in 2006.

Jurecic made no such specific claim in her largely thoughtful essay. In fairness, though, we'd have to say that she may have fudged the matter a bit.

From that headline, a reader might also think that something "happened to" Daniels on the occasion in question. That something had perhaps been done to Daniels, not that Daniels—she was 27 years old at the time—had perhaps engaged in a set of voluntary behaviors.

What actually happened on the one occasion in question? We can't exactly tell you!

We can direct you to the transcripts of Daniels' testimony concerning that question. That said, her testimony is merely what Daniels has said—more specifically, what she said on the witness stand in the Trump trial last week 

Daniels has said various other things on various occasion in the past. There is no obvious way to turn her most recent statements—all of which may be perfectly accurate—into an account which can be verified as something which is known.

We can show you what Daniels has said. We can't necessarily tell you what actually happened. That said, here's the way Jurecic's essay started:

What Happened to Stormy Daniels Is Not Salacious

One evening in March 2018, I joined some friends at a bar in Washington, D.C., to watch a live broadcast of Anderson Cooper’s interview with the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels on 60 Minutes. For months, we’d all been reading news stories about Daniels’s reported sexual encounter with then-President Donald Trump, along with Trump’s efforts to pay her off in order to cover it up before the 2016 election—and now, finally, we were going to hear from the woman herself. The story itself seemed funny, an absurd dispatch from a faraway, brightly colored world of celebrity gossip.

But once the broadcast started, the story that Daniels told was not funny at all. It sounded, in fact, a great deal like the accounts of many of the women who had been recently sharing their experiences of sexual coercion as part of the #MeToo movement, which had exploded just a few months before, following The New York Times’ reporting on the abuses of the film producer Harvey Weinstein. Daniels hadn’t wanted to sleep with Trump, she told Cooper, but felt that “I had it coming for making a bad decision, for going to someone’s room alone.” Still, she insisted that she was “not a victim.” The atmosphere in the bar remained cheerful, but my “Dark and Stormy Daniels” cocktail no longer seemed quite so amusing an order. I left feeling unsettled.

"I left [the bar] feeling unsettled," Jurecic said. Because Jurecic is a good, decent person, there's no obvious reason why she shouldn't have had that reaction.

That said:

In that passage, Jurecic is describing "the story that Daniels told." More specifically, she's describing the story "she told [Anderson] Cooper." 

That said, here's the problem:

On that evening, in that bar, there was no obvious way to assess the extent to which "the story Daniels told" was factually accurate. 

To this day, Donald J. Trump insists that the story Daniels told is wholly bogus. That said, it has long been clear that there is no earthly reason to believe anything Donald Trump says.

A sensible person can't believe anything Donald Trump says. Stating the obvious, that doesn't let us determine the extent to which we can credit the various assertions offered by Daniels herself.

Last week, pundits were busy turning unknowns into knowns all across the fruited plains of Blue America. 

Jurecic was unsettled by what she heard Daniels say that night. But Daniels had sought a big sack of cash for the story she said she wanted to tell, and our politics has been roiled in the past by unreliable story-tellers seeking other such sacks of cash.

Does Quinta Jurecic actually know "what happened to Stormy Daniels?" Putting it a slightly less partisan way, does Jurecic actually know what actually happened that one night, way back in 2006?

Does Jurecic know what happened? There's no point in her (largely) thoughtful essay where she makes any such claim. The editor who presumably composed that headline seems to have taken the usual liberties with something Jurecic said much later on, in the following passage:

For all the attention that Daniels’s testimony has received, how much of a difference it will really make to an eventual verdict is not obvious. Though prosecutors seem to have calculated that her story will help build their case, the key questions they must prove to the jury don’t depend on what Daniels says happened to her that evening or whether she’s telling the truth. And there’s a risk that the sometimes-graphic details shared by Daniels might provide Trump with legal arguments with which to appeal any conviction, on the grounds that they could bias the jury against the defendant in a case that doesn’t turn legally on matters of sex. Twice, following Daniels’s testimony, Trump’s legal team moved for a mistrial on these same grounds—motions that the trial judge denied.

On cross-examination, the former president’s lawyer seemed committed to attacking Daniels’s credibility regarding her interactions with Trump. The questions took a shape familiar to anyone who has ever been questioned about their own experience of assault: Shouldn’t you have known that this was what he wanted? You didn’t say no? Aren’t you just making this all up? Daniels fought back, insisting on the truth of what had happened to her. Throughout it all, Trump sat there silently. When Daniels left the courtroom, he looked straight ahead, not turning to watch her go.

In the first of those paragraphs, Jurecic refers to "what Daniels says happened to her that evening." Apparently choosing to take the usual liberties, some headline writer dropped the part of that formulation in which Jurecic is explicitly referring to what Daniels says.

Also gone is Jurecic's reference to the fact that there might conceivably be a question concerning "whether [Daniels is] telling the truth." And in the second of those paragraphs, Jurecic herself creates a bit of a sea monster, offering readers this:

Daniels fought back, insisting on the truth of what had happened to her. 

"Insisting on the truth of what had happened to her?" By now, even Jurecic seemed to be hiding the ball. Wouldn't that odd formulation have made more sense if she had instead written this:

Daniels fought back, insisting on the truth of what she says happened to her. 

Who knows? Maybe that's what Jurecic wrote, and some editor did a bit of editing—all part of the never-ending human desire to turn unknowns into knowns.

No one denies the fact that Daniels and Trump met one day, in 2006, at a "celebrity" golf event. A photo exists of the two together. There seems to be evidence that the two also met on a few later occasions.

Little else can be said to be known about the matter at hand.

That said, it increasingly seems that our hapless Blue American tribe may be on its way to electoral defeat at the hands of Candidate Trump. It increasingly seems that our tribe's unimpressive corporate thought leaders have come to see a conviction in the Gotham trial as perhaps the only way we can stave off this disaster.

We're going to have to lock him up! Our thought leaders focus on this possibility hour after hour, day after day after day,

We'll be voting for Candidate Biden ourselves. But at such desperate times as these, some of us humans know what we must do:

We should talk about who's zoomin' who, the only topic we human beings have ever really cared about. Also, we should start to turn a big sack of unknowns into one big pleasing known.

Such things are done all day and all night on Red America's "cable news" channel. So too over here, on our own.

Starting Monday: With what crime has the defendant been charged? In search of the allegation!