Stormy Daniels: I Was Threatened to Stay Quiet

In her much-anticipated interview with 60 Minutes, Stormy Daniels recounts a threat she received in 2011 about staying quiet regarding her alleged affair with Donald Trump. Daniels told Anderson Cooper that the threat occurred in the parking lot of a fitness center in Las Vegas, a few weeks after Daniels had for the first time agreed to tell her story to a gossip magazine for $15,000, per CBS News. "A guy walked up on me and said to me, ‘Leave Trump alone. Forget the story,’ ” Daniels said. “And then he leaned around and looked at my daughter and said, ‘That’s a beautiful little girl. It’d be a shame if something happened to her mom.’ And then he was gone.” The magazine, a sister publication of In Touch, never ran the story because Trump's lawyers threatened to sue.

Daniels says the matter largely ended there until Trump won the presidential nomination five years later, and media sites began approaching her. That's when she says she accepted $130,000 from Trump attorney Michael Cohen to sign a non-disclosure agreement. “They made it sound like I had no choice,” Daniels said. She added that there was no threat of physical violence. "The exact sentence used was, ‘They can make your life hell in many different ways.'" Anderson asked who she meant by "they," and she replied, "I’m not exactly sure who they were. I believe it to be Michael Cohen." She said she agreed to the deal "because I was concerned for my family and their safety." (More Stormy Daniels stories.)