NEW YORK: A week and a half before the 2016 election, Donald Trump’s personal attorney paid porn star Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about her alleged relationship with the Republican presidential candidate, CNN reported on Sunday night, citing a CBS news station interview.

The network said that arrangement is well on its way to becoming the most talked-about “hush agreement” in history, with potential legal and political implications for the US President Donald Trump.

Through his spokesman, Trump has denied having an affair with Stormy Daniels, and his lawyers are now threatening her with financial ruin, saying she has to pay one million dollars every time she violates her agreement to stay silent. But that didn’t stop her from coming on CBS’s ‘60 Minutes’ show.

In a most anticipated interview, Daniels said she believed she was doing the right thing when she accepted $130,000 from a company linked to Trump attorney Michael Cohen to stay quiet.

The hush agreement allowed her to protect her career and her family, she said, according to a transcript of the show. And she was concerned about her family’s safety after what she described as a scary episode in a Las Vegas parking lot in 2011, shortly after she first tried to sell her story to a tabloid magazine.

Daniels said she was taking her infant daughter out of the car to go to a fitness class when someone approached her.

“A guy walked up on me and said to me, ‘Leave Trump alone. Forget the story’,” Daniels told journalist Anderson Cooper. “And then he leaned around and looked at my daughter and said, ‘That’s a beautiful little girl. It’d be a shame if something happened to her mom.’ And then he was gone.”

Daniels said she didn’t know the man, and she provided no evidence to back up her claim, according to the transcript. But she said she remained fearful over the years.

“They made it sound like I had no choice,” she said. While there was not any threat of physical violence at the time, she said, she was worried about other repercussions. “The exact sentence used was, ‘They can make your life hell in many different ways,’?” Daniels told Cooper. “They being?” Cooper asked. “I’m not exactly sure who they were. I believe it to be Michael Cohen,” Daniels replied.

Published in Dawn, March 27th, 2018