Peacock’s ‘Stormy’ shows us several years in the life of Stormy Daniels
The longtime porn star who may end up in your children's American history textbooks gets her due in a disjointed but worthwhile new documentary
When it comes to 2024 political documentaries about figures of controversy from the time of the Trump presidency, with the word “storm” in the title, with part of the story that multiple documentarians were simultaneously working on films about the subject, Stormy isn’t quite as good as A Storm Foretold. That doc from earlier this year about Roger Stone ended with him ranting in the back of a car on Trump’s final day in office.
That said, Stormy, which debuted this week on Peacock, is a watchable examination of the adult film actress Stormy Daniels and her years-long sexual and legal entanglement with former President Donald Trump.
Also, Stormy Daniels has spent her career in a much more dignified profession than Roger Stone has.
The Trump years have given us many stories that it’s still hard to believe are real, but that one, in particular, goes near the top of the list: In 2006, Donald Trump had an affair with the famous porn star Stormy Daniels. A decade later, when Trump was running for president, he arranged a hush money payment to Daniels, which emerged as a scandal during his presidency and led to one of his criminal indictments after that, with a trial to come as Trump seeks the presidency again.
Imagine if, in 2012, someone had read you that paragraph…
The film follows Daniels from the early days of the scandal, and the bones of what happened over those years aren’t that new: Daniels came forward, gave national TV interviews, and went on multiple tours of strip clubs, bookstores, and even universities. She and Trump sued one another repeatedly, and Daniels was arrested in Columbus under highly shady circumstances. We also see her Saturday Night Live appearance from that horrible era when Alec Baldwin showed up weekly to play Trump.
She also had dealings with a pair of lawyers named Michael — Cohen and Avenatti — who each ended up disbarred and imprisoned. Daniels’ lawyer, Avenatti, was an especially loathsome snake who parlayed his work for Daniels into an extremely brief run as a Resistance hero before getting caught stealing from Daniels and other clients, leading to multiple criminal convictions and a lengthy prison sentence. The film, however, omits the episode when Daniels agreed to appear on Cohen’s podcast, which was, despite their early hush money agreement, their first-ever meeting.
Daniels has written a memoir and given interviews sharing many of these things, and I’m making the documentary sound like a rehash of well-known events, but there are some revelations.
Since this all started, Daniels has divorced one husband and married another. Much of the footage was filmed by one documentarian, who became romantically involved with her and subsequently stepped away, which explains a multi-year time jump at one point; Sarah Gibson is the director of the finished film, while Erin Lee Carr produced. And throughout, she has gotten a horrific number of death threats, mainly from Trump Stans.
We learn that since the Trump story emerged, Daniels’ audiences have changed, with a lot more gay men showing up; judging by some of the articles I’ve read, her strip club appearances are attended by quite a few journalists as well. The film’s biggest laugh is when a pair of Wall Street Journal reporters who broke the hush money story are asked if they’ve ever met or interacted with Daniels. They answer that they once attended her strip club show — to “solicit comment” — and one of them was put in a position to “motorboat” her.
Stormy Daniels may very well end up a significant figure in American political history, and this documentary, while disjointed at times, mostly does her wild story justice.