News
Here's When Stormy Daniels' Entire '60 Minutes' Interview Will Reportedly Air
According to The Washington Post, CBS is set to air a 60 Minutes interview with Stormy Daniels on March 25. Daniels recorded the interview in early March, according to The Hill, but CBS has been silent as to when the sit-down will air. Although no excerpts from the interview have been released, it's believed that Daniels discussed her alleged affair with Donald Trump. Michael Cohen, Trump's lawyer, says that the president "vehemently denies" having had sex with Daniels.
CBS hasn't confirmed the March 25 air date, and The Post notes that it's still tentative. BuzzFeed had previously reported that CBS was planning to broadcast the interview on March 18.
In a lawsuit filed March 6, Daniels claimed that she and Trump had an affair from 2006 to 2007, and accused Trump and Cohen of attempting to silence her with a non-disclosure agreement. Daniels argues that Trump himself never signed the non-disclosure agreement, and is asking a judge to declare it invalid.
Two days after Daniels filed that suit, her lawyer Michael Avenatti tweeted out a picture of him, Daniels, and Anderson Cooper, and tagged all three of them. In that same tweet, Avenatti also tagged 60 Minutes' official Twitter account, stoking speculation that Daniels had given an interview on the long-running news program, for which Anderson is a correspondent. CNN confirmed this speculation later that day.
Shortly thereafter, BuzzFeed News reported that "lawyers associated with President Donald Trump" were considering taking legal action to prevent CBS from airing the interview. According to The Daily Beast, however, Trump's legal team had not yet filed any such lawsuit against CBS by Wednesday evening.
The Wall Street Journal broke news of the alleged affair between Daniels and Trump in January, and also reported that in the last weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign, Cohen had paid Daniels $130,000 to sign a non-disclosure agreement in which she agreed not to talk publicly about it. Cohen soon admitted that he had paid $130,000 to Daniels, but refused to say what it was for and stressed that the money came from his own pocket. He further alleged that "neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction."
Daniels hasn't publicly confirmed the alleged affair since the Journal article was published. In a 2011 interview with In Touch magazine, however, she said that she and Trump had a sexual relationship after meeting at a charity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, and spoke freely and at length about her experiences with him. In Touch didn't publish the interview at the time because Cohen threatened to sue, according to the Associated Press. However, the magazine made the interview public in January.
In addition, Daniels gave a radio interview in 2007 in which she discussed an affair she had with a celebrity who she did not name. The details that she described matched up with her 2011 account of the alleged affair with Trump, and the host of that show said on Tuesday that Daniels told him at the time that she was discussing Trump.
Since the Journal article was published, Daniels has generally been tight-lipped about her relationship with Trump. In late January, her publicist released a statement denying the affair that was supposedly signed by Daniels. In an interview with Jimmy Kimmel later that day, however, Daniels said that it "doesn't look like my signature," and said that she did "not know where [the statement] came from." In her March lawsuit, Daniels said that she only signed the January statement because Cohen "forced" her to do so "through intimidation and coercive tactics."