Key Points
- Stormy Daniels was born Stephanie Clifford - Daniels is her stage name.
- As well as appearing in adult films, she has featured in the movies The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up.
- Daniels has also launched her own reality show where she searches haunted houses as a paranormal investigator.
This article contains references to sexual harassment and sexual assault.
Stormy Daniels was 27 years old when the alleged encounter with former US president Donald Trump, that has led to him being indicted over falsifying business records, is said to have occurred.
At the time, she’d been featuring in adult films for about four years. Today, she has been in the adult entertainment industry for more than two decades and her name has become synonymous with Trump’s legal matters.
But there is more to the actor, who is now 44 years old.
Born Stephanie Clifford, Daniels is actually her stage name.
She is married to a fellow adult film star and has a young daughter and a horse farm, according to her social media profiles.
In Ms Daniels' 2018 memoir Full Disclosure, she described how her childhood was marred by sexual assault and poverty.
She grew up in Louisiana with a single mother. "We were just trash. And my mom was a trainwreck, and my clothes didn't fit, and I was poor and I smelled," Daniels previously told Vice News.
Ms Daniels said she had been a straight-A student when she left home and started stripping to support herself, before moving into the adult film industry.
She then won industry awards and landed roles in TV shows and movies including The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up.
It was in 2006 that the alleged encounter with Mr Trump occurred, for which Ms Daniels has said she received hush money.
However, she is not shy about capitalising on the attention around her connection to Mr Trump.
Ms Daniels has pointed out that he has done the same but, in her view, has faced far less criticism.
"You take the opportunity," she said on a livestream on OnlyFans, according to a report by British newspaper The Independent.
After a failed in 2018 over comments he made on Twitter, she went on to launch her own reality TV series.
In the series, Spooky Babes, she searches haunted houses as a paranormal investigator.
The show’s Instagram page describes Ms Daniels as a "medium/paranormal investigator" and features photographs of her ‘haunted doll’ named Susan.
Following the announcement that Mr Trump would be indicted, Ms Daniels tweeted a message of thanks to her supporters.
At the same time, searches for Ms Daniels on the website Pornhub jumped 21,655 per cent, according to the site's research and analysis branch.
In an interview with Britain's Times newspaper on Friday, Ms Daniels called the indictment "vindication" and referred to a vulgar comment Mr Trump made in a 2005 recording, in which he boasted about forcing himself on women.
"But it's bittersweet," she said. "He's done so much worse that he should have been taken down before. I am fully aware of the insanity of it being a porn star. But it's also poetic; this pussy grabbed back."
Additional reporting by Aleisha Orr.
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