The first thing Stormy Daniels wants you to know is that she’s not a liar. Second, she’s not an opportunist. And third — and she will repeat it until you understand — she is not a victim. The question is why she cares so much that you know it.
“This is not a ‘MeToo,’ ” Daniels said during an interview on “60 Minutes” on Sunday. She didn’t want to have sex with Donald Trump back in 2006, but she didn’t say no. She wasn’t physically attracted to him, but she had come to his hotel room alone and a voice inside her head told her, “Well, you put yourself in a bad situation and bad things happen, so you deserve this.”
It is difficult to hear these words and not recall every conversation of these past months about the spectrum of consent. As my colleague Christine Emba has written, “No one ‘deserves’ unwanted sex”; that Daniels believed she had to say “yes” when she felt “no” is a symptom of the same disease we’ve been discussing all this time.
In the end, though, Daniels has the prerogative to define herself and her experience. She doesn’t like “victim.” That’s that. More interesting is the reasoning behind that rejection: Daniels seems to think the #MeToo movement is better off without her, and maybe she’s right. But Daniels also might be better off without the movement.
Hijacking her story, Daniels said on Sunday, “to further someone else’s agenda, does horrible damage to people who are true victims.” It’s a fair point. Right now, you can’t hear Daniels’s name without thinking of Trump. Tying her to #MeToo would politicize the movement more than it has been already — turning the spotlight on an attempt to take down the president, and distracting from the everyday plight of women across industries.
Then there are the benefits that distance from #MeToo could bring the adult-film actresss. A perplexing puzzle in the Daniels saga is what exactly the woman at its center wants. “I guess I’m not 100 percent sure on why you’re doing this,” Anderson Cooper said at the beginning of the “60 Minutes” segment, and he is hardly alone. Daniels hazards retaliation — and, according to Michael Cohen, $1 million — every time she talks. For that risk, there’s one real reward: A better burnished public persona.
Daniels has become something of an ambassador for a profession that, despite being “legitimate and legal,” to borrow Daniels’s words, exists more or less underground. We don’t talk about the latest porn release at the water cooler. And there’s a perception that, apart from any abuse that may occur behind the porn-production scenes, anyone who acts in an adult film is necessarily exploited — that someone like Daniels operates at the mercy of the men who, when she shows up on their screens, see her as little more than an object.
To get the world to take her and her industry seriously, Daniels has to explain to us this, all of it, is her choice. She owns her body, and she owns her appeal. She’s not a plaything. She’s certainly not a victim.
Asserting this sort of agency probably helps bolster Daniels’s bank account. Daniels said on “60 Minutes” that countering Trump could mean “automatically . . . alienating half of my fan base.” Think what would happen to the other half if a narrative of victimhood convinced some viewers that watching Daniels’s films makes them no better than Trump. After all, they’re both taking advantage.
But agency also plays into the other reward for Daniels’s daring: sweet, sweet victory. Daniels has been blackmailed and browbeaten and slimed into oblivion, and now she’s swinging back. She may want to trump Trump, to play by his rules and beat him, to do it on her terms and not those of some broader cultural crossroads. She’s never been in sync with mainstream culture before. Why should she start now? She doesn’t want to be a victim. She wants to be the winner.
