Stormy Daniels pops the champagne as Trump is indicted over hush money payments

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Stormy Daniels was in a celebratory mood on Thursday evening after news broke that Donald Trump was being indicted for his role in a hush-money payment to her in 2016.

“Thank you to everyone for your support and love!” Ms Daniels tweeted. “I have so many messages coming in that I can’t respond...also don’t want to spill my champagne #Teamstormy merch/autograph orders are pouring in, too! Thank you for that as well but allow a few extra days for shipment.”

Ms Daniels also highlighted a statement made by her attorney Clark Brewster calling for “truth and justice to prevail”.

Ms Daniels and Mr Trump allegedly had an affair in 2006. A decade later, when Mr Trump was the Republican nominee for president, Mr Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen paid Ms Daniels’s then-attorney Keith Davidson $130,000 in exchange for her silence about the relationship in a non-disclosure agreement.

Mr Trump has claimed that the affair never happened and that the payment to Ms Daniels was made to stop her from making false accusations in public. Ms Daniels sued to have the non-disclosure agreement invalidated in 2018 and then sued Mr Trump for defamation after he authored a tweet in which he said she was guilty of a “con job”.

The two celebrities, who Ms Daniels says met at a golf tournament at Lake Tahoe in 2006 just a year after Mr Trump married his current wife Melania Trump, have been at odds since.

In an interview with The Times on Friday, Ms Daniels elaborated on her feelings regarding Mr Trump’s indictment.

“It’s vindication,” Ms Daniels told the newspaper. “But it’s bittersweet. He’s done so much worse that he should have been taken down [for] before. I am fully aware of the insanity of it being a porn star. But it’s also poetic; this pussy grabbed back.”

But in addition to her happiness about the possibility of Mr Trump facing some measure of accountability for his actions, she said she’s also frightened by violent threats from Mr Trump’s supporters as he campaigns to reclaim the White House in next year’s election.

“The number and the intensity is the same as it was the first time around, but this time it’s straight-up violent,” Ms Daniels said. “The first time it was ‘gold digger’, ‘slut’, ‘whore’, ‘liar’ whatever. And this time it’s ‘I’m gonna murder you’. They’re way more violent and graphic.”