Last week, adult-film star Stormy Daniels finally took the stand and testified about her sexual encounter with Donald Trump. Though it’ll likely be weeks before a verdict is reached in Trump’s hush-money trial, Daniels’s husband says the outcome might determine his family’s future plans.
In an interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett Tuesday, Barrett Blade, who like his wife has worked in the porn industry, said he and Daniels have discussed what will happen if Trump is acquitted.
“Either way, I don’t think it gets better for her,” he said. “I think if it’s ‘not guilty,’ we got to decide what to do. Good chance we’ll probably vacate this country.”
Blade said even a conviction in the case would be accompanied by hate from Trump’s supporters, who would likely blame Daniels for the verdict. Clark Brewster, Daniels’s attorney, recently described his client as being “paralyzed with fear” in the days leading up to her testimony and said she wore a bulletproof vest every day until she got to court.
“I don’t see it as a win situation either way,” Blade said. “I know that we would like to get on with our lives. I know that she wants to move past this. We just want to do what I guess you’d say normal people get to do in some aspects, but I don’t know if that ever will be, you know? And it breaks my heart.”
Daniels testified that she first met Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe in 2006, and that she later joined him in his penthouse hotel suite for what was intended to be dinner. In detailed testimony, Daniels described having sex with Trump in a brief tryst that she said was consensual but came with a notable “imbalance of power.” The trial centers around $130,000 that Trump’s then-attorney Michael Cohen made to Daniels in exchange for the rights to her story and thus her silence. The prosecution has argued that the payment was an attempt by Trump to prevent unsavory stories from coming out during the 2016 election.
During cross-examination, the defense tried to use Daniels’s profession against her, with attorney Susan Necheles, at one point, saying that Daniels has “a lot of experience in making phony stories about sex appear to be real.” According to Blade, his wife is used to that type of rhetoric.
“People are trying to slut-shame her since day one, and she’s proud of what she does, you know? She does not think that sex is a negative thing,” he said on CNN.
Responding the defense’s suggestion that Daniels made up her story, Blade seemed to echo his wife, who said on the stand that she would’ve written the encounter to be “a lot better” were it not true. “She’s a brilliant writer. She would’ve wrote it a lot more entertaining and with a lot better person, I would imagine,” he said with a laugh.
Blade acknowledged that the situation has come with a lot of stress for Daniels but said that she just wants to move past this part of her life.
“As much as it’s boring for the media to keep hearing it over and over again, it sucks for her to have to keep saying it over and over again,” he said. “It wears on her, but she’s a warrior, and I think she needed to get her final say so that she can move on with her life.”
