Stormy Daniels Takes the Stand

In today’s edition,Nick Paumgarten on abig dog’s big breakin the movies. But, first, exclusively for newsletter readers, Eric Lach reports from inside the courtroom at Donald Trump’s hush-money trial in New York. Was this e-mail forwarded to you?Sign up.

This morning,at Donald Trump’s criminal trial, an Assistant District Attorney rose and said the words everyone had been waiting to hear: “The people call Stormy Daniels.” This case has always been surreal; it concerns hush money that was paid to Daniels, an adult-film actor, in 2016. But, until Daniels strolled jauntily into the courtroom today, theimprobable, grubby realityof the whole affair had yet to come into focus.

For several hours, Daniels took the court through her story, from her childhood in Louisiana to her ventures in the adult-film industry. Then she recounted the fateful day, in 2006, when she met the future President at a celebrity golf tournament. At the time, Daniels was under contract with a company called Wicked Pictures. “Wicked sponsored one of the holes on the golf course,” Daniels said. “It was funny, one of the adult-film companies sponsoring one of the holes.”

Some reporters in the gallery chuckled, but no one else in the courtroom smiled—not the judge, not the prosecutors, not the defendant, nor his lawyers. The members of the jury seemed to behold Daniels with curiosity, and to take her words seriously. Daniels answered the prosecutor Susan Hoffinger’s questions gamely, and sometimes in more detail than Judge Juan Merchan wanted, which repeatedly prompted Trump’s lawyer Susan Necheles to object. Daniels gave an elaborate description of the hotel suite she said Trump invited her to, down to the black-and-white tile floor in the foyer. She detailed the nearly two hours of conversation that she and Trump shared in the dining room of the suite. She said that Trump asked her about the adult-film industry, but that, unlike most people, he was less interested in the sordid details than the practicalities. “Are there any unions? Do you get residuals?” she recalled him asking. What about testing, he wanted to know. Was she worried about S.T.D.s?

When Daniels talked about spanking Trump with a magazine, some of the jurors finally cracked. At Merchan’s urging, Hoffinger asked Daniels to be as brief as possible in describing sex between the two. Daniels said they had been in the “missionary position.” Necheles objected, again. Merchan sustained the objection. Later, Daniels testified that Trump did not wear a condom. “Was that concerning to you?” Hoffinger asked, to which Daniels replied, “Yes.” When Hoffinger asked why Daniels didn’t say anything about it, Daniels told her, “I didn’t say anything at all.”

For much of Daniels’s testimony, Trump sat looking away from her. Before lunch, Hoffinger asked Daniels to discuss the details of the hush-money payment she received from Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen a few days before the 2016 election. In her telling, she accepted a hundred and thirty thousand dollars in exchange for her silence mostly because she didn’t want her then partner to find out about the encounter. “I didn’t care about the amount—it was just to get it done,” Daniels said. “The number didn’t matter to me.”

After the lunch break, Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche requested a mistrial. He said that Daniels’s testimony had been extremely embarrassing to Trump. “How can we come back from this in a way that is fair for President Trump?” he asked Merchan. The judge allowed that Daniels had said some things on the stand that would have been better left “unsaid.” “In fairness to the people, I think the witness was a little difficult to control,” Merchan noted. But he did not grant the mistrial. “The remedy,” he said, “is on cross-examination.” Daniels is expected to testify through Thursday.

Bill Berloni has worked with pigs, geese, and butterflies. He recently prepared Bing for his starring role in the adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s “The Friend.”

Bill Berlonioriginated the Baloney Drop back in the seventies, when he was training a dog for the key role of Sandy in the musical “Annie,” on Broadway. Sandy was skittish and inexperienced, and Berloni realized that silently dropping a piece of the lunch meat would help the animal hit his mark onstage. Berloni has been supplying, hiring, and coaching animals to perform ever since. Inthis entertaining piecefrom this week’s issue, Nick Paumgarten follows Berloni as he readies a new trainee, Bing, for his big break in the movies. Bing is a Great Dane, and “magisterial in every respect,” Paumgarten writes. His demeanor, upon meeting Paumgarten at the film’s production offices, is mildly curious, self-possessed, and slightly awkward: “your basic arriving-at-an-office vibe.” But, on set, Bing is a total pro, nailing take after take.

He is starring alongside Naomi Watts in an adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s novel “The Friend,” about a writer in Manhattan whose friend and mentor, a more famous writer, has recently died and left her with a very large dog named Apollo. The plot is, as Paumgarten explains, “fundamentally, a love story between two bereaved creatures, writer and dog, seeking consolation and companionship in a treacherous world.” In preparing for their roles, Watts and Bing would go on walks together. He was noticed wherever they went, and Watts remarked, “it’s like being out with a rock star.”

Plus:for another amazing canine, read Susan Orlean onthe story of Rin Tin Tin, who, in the early twentieth century, made twenty-three silent films and starred in, among other talkies and commercials, “Where the North Begins,” a movie made just for him. It was said that the dog’s eyes conveyed something “tragic, fierce, sad and . . . a nobility and degree of loyalty not credible in a person.”

SupportThe New Yorker’saward-winning journalism.Subscribe today »

P.S. The first timeAnna Heyward’s foster dog bit her, she had been putting on his new harness; the second time, she was petting him after giving him a treat. “The third, fourth, fifth, and all the subsequent times were similar,” she explains, “Everything would be normal, and then I would blithely cross an invisible line.” Many people (and certain politicians) might give up on such an animal, but inthis moving personal history, Heyward shows how good it can be to care for a bad dog. “To love another animal so different and useless,” she writes, “is to remind ourselves of how strange, complex, and irresponsible our behavior as humans can be.”