‘It was my most terrifying experience – and I’ve seen Trump naked!’: Stormy Daniels on standup, tarot and reality TV

She has endured death threats, hate mail and unfair arrests, but now Stormy Daniels wants to help gay men find love. She talks about her new dating show, writing jokes – and why she won’t back down

‘There is nothing anyone can say that can embarrass me,” says Stormy Daniels, the pornography actor who became a household name in 2018 when it was revealed Donald Trump had paid her to keep quiet about a 2006 affair. “I have seen my butthole on a Jumbotron. You can’t shame me.”

I’m calling Daniels to discuss the new gay dating show she presents, For the Love of Dilfs, and whether it could be her chance to finally put Trump, and the numerous scandals that followed, behind her.

For the Love of Dilfs brings together two of the internet’s favourite gay archetypes: “daddies” – older, caring guys – and “himbos”, who have muscular bodies but sweet hearts. The daddies and the himbos live in a Love Island-type setup – a luxurious waterfront property, in which they swap partners and do tasks in search of their one true love (and $10,000). Tonally, it’s comic and camp, from the Come Dine With Me-style voiceover poking fun at contestants to the heavy dollop of innuendo reminiscent of RuPaul’s Drag Race.

As host, Daniels lives among the singles, setting up tasks and offering relationship advice (“Which may sound kind of weird,” she jokes in the first episode, “but hey, the cheque cleared.”). She has a particular style of delivery I couldn’t fully get a read on. I wondered if it was all some knowingly self-aware joke. After speaking to Daniels for the best part of an hour, my conclusion is: probably. Because she is really very funny. “I wrote a third to half of the jokes,” she says. “But the writer really knew my voice. He’d watched my standup comedy.” Stormy Daniels did standup? “It was the most terrifying experience of my life, and that’s saying something because I’ve seen Trump naked.”

Before Covid cut her tour short, Daniels did 15 sold-out standup shows. “I’ve always been terrified of public speaking,” she says. “But when my book came out, my initial idea was to write all these funny things that happened to me, because my whole life I feel like I’ve been saying: ‘Oh my God. Why me? Are you kidding?’ But they wanted the book to be serious, and cut all the funny stuff out,” so that material became her standup show.

As for the book, Full Disclosure, it charts the story of Daniels (real name Stephanie Clifford) from her impoverished, emotionally and sexually abusive childhood in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to her first job as a stripper in high school, through to breaking into pornography and becoming an award-winning actor, writer and director in the field. “I actually wanted to be a journalist when I was young,” she tells me. “I was the editor of the high-school paper, but I didn’t have enough creative freedom. That’s why I started writing scripts – and yes, it’s just porn, but they’re like movies. They actually cut the sex out and show them on cable.”

It also describes her time with Trump in excruciating detail, pulling no punches about his “unusual” genitals (“like a toadstool,” it reads), his empty promises to get her on The Apprentice (and let her win), and feeling pressured to sign the non-disclosure agreement at the heart of the scandal. It is not an overstatement to say the whole thing put a target on Daniels’s back, replete with hate mail and death threats.

“I was used to getting a lot of shit from people just from being a porn star, but it got crazy. I have a tough skin so I didn’t show it. This is probably the first time I’ve ever admitted it publicly, but there was a point about a year and a half in where it was just terrible. I lost a lot of friends, I wasn’t seeing my daughter, Covid stopped my work, I had no creative outlet. And there were all these things people were saying about me. Lies.” She pauses. “I went down a bad slope.”

There was a point when she decided she could either “lay here and continue to pray for death or get up”. She chose to get up. “Nothing’s going to piss off your haters more than you getting up.” The scandal didn’t stop there. There was her arrest in Columbus, Ohio, for illegally touching a patron at a strip club – charges that were dropped 12 hours later. In turn, Daniels filed a lawsuit against the officers involved, arguing they were Trump supporters who entered into a “conspiracy” against her. The city of Columbus eventually settled with Daniels for $450,000 and the officers were disciplined. And there were the issues surrounding her former lawyer, Michael Avenatti, who is in jail for defrauding Daniels out of her book advance, among other crimes. “Can you see why I should have called my book Why Me?” says Daniels.

Somehow, through all of this, she has managed to keep up with her pet project: professional tarot reading. “I did 300 readings last year. I have a couple more booked in for tomorrow.”

I ask whether For the Love of Dilfs could be her way of closing the book on that scandalous chapter. “I have made the mistake of thinking that before and then it starts again,” she says. In fact, she has noticed an uptick in abuse ever since Trump announced he will run again for president.

How does she stay so positive? “Vodka!” she says, though it can’t hurt that she has found whole new audiences, including a large LGBTQ fanbase. “I think it started with my female gay fans. Because I’m openly bisexual.” It was reported in 2019 that Daniels had come out during what she calls “sport” – that is, sparring with trolls on Twitter. But, she says, “someone didn’t do their research. Because the first year I was in porn I had a girlfriend and only worked with other women.”

“And then I stood up against the president, and spoke out and defended people.”

At the height of Daniels’s notoriety, she used her platform for activism, organising charity events for women and LGBTQ causes, with a heavy pinch of her naughty humour – think a campaign called Fairies for Fairies and a party titled A Midsummer Night’s Cream.

“Before Trump, my audience in the strip club was mostly older white men in suits. After Trump I came out and my audience was a rainbow. It was lots of women, couples, gay and trans people,” she says. “I’d be naked on stage and some of them would come up to try and tip looking so nervous! Sometimes they’d be crying and I’d have to say: ‘No crying, this is a strip club, that is very weird. Now please give me a dollar.’”

Daniels reflects that “it’s really cool to be part of the first gay dating show” (it’s not quite the first, though it is the first exclusively gay dating show since 2016’s Finding Prince Charming) and that the world gets to “see these guys as real people instead of the stereotype. That applies to me as well.”

Does that mean she wants to move away from the sexy stuff? “I’ll be honest, I hope sexy stuff is always part of my brand,” she says. “I just hope it’s not sexy with orange people and all presidents.”

Despite the tone of For the Love of Dilfs, Daniels says the contestants really are looking for love. “We all want to be loved. We want to feel love. We want to see love. We want to believe in love. It’s the one thing we can’t put in a bottle.”

Happily for Daniels, she has found love. She recently married her best friend, porn actor and cinematographer Barrett Blade. “I’ve been in love with him since I was 19, before either of us did porn, and he didn’t ask me out until last year.” Blade was one of the videographers on For the Love of Dilfs. “It was the only time I was in a house full of horny men and none of them were interested in me.”

I want to return to the “Oh my God, why me” way Daniels describes her life. I tell her about a story I heard about a man who was so unlucky he was involved in numerous car crashes, train crashes, even a plane crash. But he survived them all unscathed, making him simultaneously the luckiest man alive. Could it not be that she too is the luckiest, having fought the president and, arguably, won?

“I’m not super-religious but you know they say something like ‘God only gives you what you can take’?” she says. “There’s a reason that it was me, though I look at it more literally. I didn’t back down like so many other women did, because you can’t shame me.”

As our time draws to a close I have just one more question: “Stormy, reckon you might run for office?”

“Why do people keep saying that?” she says. “I feel like I’m in The Godfather – I try to get out and they keep pulling me back in. But hey, never say never. And if I do, you know me, I’m going to go big and run for president. Fuck it, I’m going to paint the White House pink.”

For the Love of Dilfs starts on Froot TV on 31 January.

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