After Michael Cohen’s guilty plea, is StormyDaniels— with her telegenic lawyer, Michael Avenatti—President Trump’s most formidable adversary?
GROWING UP in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, had a running joke that her parents, Bill and Sheila Gregory, must have stolen her from a rich couple at the mall.
“They can’t be my real parents,” she remembers thinking. “Like, my mom lives in a house that has a boat in the front yard that hasn’t seen water since 1982, and she’s content to just sit there and chain-smoke, and I just couldn’t be like that.” Her dad left when she was four, and Daniels remembers her mother working two jobs but falling behind on bills. She’ll never forget the August in Baton Rouge when the electricity was cut off, and even today when one of her roadies tears open a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos on the tour bus, the scent viscerally takes her back to a childhood fueled by junk food. “Hi-C, the punch. And Vienna Sausage on saltines—that was an actual meal in my house,” she says. Daniels is still fuming about astory in which Sheila Gregory told a reporter she was hurt by her daughter and that she would vote for Trump “four more times” if she could. Did Daniels talk to her mom after the story ran? “I haven’t talked to my mom in over ten years,” she says, “and I haven’t talked to my dad in 22 years.” I ask her if there was abuse in her house—as has been the case for so many women who get into the sex industry. “Not abusive,” Daniels says about her childhood. “It was neglectful.” Daniels attended Scotlandville Magnet High School, then an engineering-focused college-preparatory school. Daniels was one of the few students who didn’t come from a private school and a middle- to upper-middle-class background. After school, Daniels would go to McDonald’s, where her best friend worked, and would hang out until closing to get free food. In 1997, as a senior determined to move away from home, Daniels got a job dancing at the Gold Club. She bleached her hair and reinvented herself as Stormy Daniels—named after Mötley Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx’s daughter Storm and the whiskey Jack Daniels. Daniels laughs because at the time, she’d been a relatively unpopular teenager who’d had to pay a guy to take her to prom. She aced her ACT and says she got full scholarships to Mississippi State and Texas A&M. “I still have the letters,” Daniels boasts. But as her Scotlandville peers set their sights on becoming doctors and lawyers and engineers, college and an out-of-state move were not in the realm of possibility for her family. She didn’t even tell her best high school friend that she was stripping. “She said when I saw her last month that she didn’t tell me because she didn’t want to disappoint me,” Daniels’s high school friend says. “I have such a tender heart for Stormy.” Daniels isn’t one to have regrets, but when she thinks about Scotlandville she says, “I always wonder what my life would be like if I had parents like the other kids who went to my high school.”
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