Opening night at the 2024 South by Southwest Film Festival may have been dominated by Doug Liman\u2019s remake of \u201cRoad House,\u201d but there was a major event unfolding just next door at almost the same time, a major stop on the career train route of one of the most unexpected public figures of the last decade. \u201cStormy\u201d unpacks the last several years in the life of Stormy Daniels, a name that produces incredibly\u00a0strong responses around the world. Those who forgive former President Donald Trump of literally any legal or moral indiscretion have turned Daniels into a villain, seeing her only as someone seeking money and fame. An increasingly larger contingent sees Daniels as a powerful woman who fearlessly asserted her right to not be called a liar by one of the most important people in the world. I would like to hope that even Stormy\u2019s critics and enemies could be moved by the film about her because, at its core, it\u2019s a successful attempt to strip away the political issues and present its subject as a flesh-and-blood human being, someone with feelings, anxieties, and a great deal of courage.<\/p>\n
Of course, that\u2019s probably na\u00efve. People on the far end of the political spectrum see all of Trump\u2019s enemies as their own. It\u2019s not so much that they don\u2019t believe that Trump and Michael Cohen used campaign money to keep an affair with Stormy Daniels quiet\u2014it\u2019s that they don\u2019t care that they did. The facts are the facts, even if it took Trump and his cronies years to come around to admitting most of them. Daniels herself is very open about the early encounters she had with Trump, ones in which he promised to get her on \u201cCelebrity Apprentice,\u201d and the one time they slept together, which she carefully asserts she didn\u2019t really want to do but also didn\u2019t resist. She\u2019s actually relatively kind to Trump when she talks about their personal interactions, speaking about how she thought he was just as interested in her intelligence as her body\u2014and Daniels is undeniably intelligent, using her background to become a successful porn director and businesswoman. <\/p>\n
The problems didn\u2019t really start until the story of the affair broke, and Trump started denying it, turning Daniels into a liar in the public eye. Unlike so many people that Trump has targeted, Daniels fought back. Michael Cohen eventually admitted to paying Daniels to be quiet; Trump played games with how much he knew about it; Giuliani ultimately said that Trump himself paid Cohen back. Cohen was charged with a campaign finance violation, sentenced to three years in prison, and disbarred. However, as he so often does, Trump skated off to another scandal, leaving Daniels to deal with the consistent harassment and even death threats. <\/p>\n
Using a lot of footage that was filmed for a documentary that Daniels started producing in 2018, \u201cStormy\u201d allows remarkable access into a national scandal in a way that deeply humanizes its subject. Whatever you think of Daniels, I would hope we could agree that she shouldn\u2019t have to fear for the safety of herself or her child. The threats of violence reached such a peak that there\u2019s a heartbreaking scene in which she basically talks about the filmmakers using her footage as proof of what\u2019s been happening should she be murdered. \u201cStormy\u201d is a portrait of a woman who has had to live in fear, watched her marriage collapse, and was consistently harassed\u2014all because she undeniably, provably, told the truth about a financial payment. That\u2019s insane. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Opening night at the 2024 South by Southwest Film Festival may have been dominated by Doug Liman\u2019s remake of \u201cRoad House,\u201d but there was a major event unfolding just next door at almost the same time, a major stop on the career train route of one of the most unexpected public figures of the last …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[43],"class_list":["post-1302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-documentary-movies","tag-documentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1302"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1302\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}