Three women journalists respond to Stormy Daniels's testimony

I didn't expect to be very interested in the porn entrepreneur's couple of days under oath in Donald Trump's trial for falsifying records of illicit payments which Trump thought, in October 2016, would protect his candidacy. There was an election to be won ...

But Donald also has insisted that he never fucked Stormy, even though he signed checks to Micheal Cohen which the prosecution asserts covered payments to Stormy for her silence.

Trump put the story of their encounter at a Tahoe golf tournament on the court's agenda by denying it ever happened.

Her testimony seems, in the opinion of many reporters, to have dispelled any possibility that this is anything but another Trump lie.

I'm finding the way women reporters handle the story fascinating.

Anita Chabria is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Perhaps distance and location afford her the opportunity for a delightfully breezy take on Stormy on the stand.

Stormy Daniels has been in the spotlight — literally — since she started stripping in Louisiana at age 17 to pay the bills when her negligent mother kept disappearing. She was called as a prosecution witness Tuesday in the Donald Trump hush money trial, putting her on the global stage.

Folks, this is a woman who isn’t scared of a fight, and isn’t afraid to talk about sex — even if we are.

In a world where women are routinely expected to be ashamed about any public conversation of sex, whether it’s consensual or during an assault, Daniels didn’t avoid the nitty-gritty.

That included accounts of spanking Trump with a magazine, silky jammies (his) and her own ambivalence in the moment, all told in a rapid-fire, conversational tone while she looked right at the jury.

Daniels’ radical shamelessness is important because it upends the status quo that men have long depended on in sex-involved court cases — that the woman will be humbled, and that she can be torn down as weak or a liar because of the humiliation, guilt and stigma we expect her to feel.

... With decades of experience as a sex worker, Daniels doesn’t seem cowed by expectation or the squeamishness displayed by [Judge] Merchan and others in the courtroom.

“You could compare it to a doctor talking about surgery and arteries and blood and tissue,” [Alana] Evans [a sister porn entrepreneur] said. “These are things they see every day and it doesn’t affect them. You show that to someone else and they may pass out.”

... to see Stormy Daniels rejecting the contempt piled on other women in her situation is wonderful — though she too said she felt the infamy of it all.

When asked who she had told about the sex, she said very few people.

“Because I felt ashamed that I didn’t stop it, that I didn’t say no. A lot of people would just assume — they would make jokes out of it. I didn’t think it was funny,” she said in court.

But why should she be disgraced with the dumb blond trope when it was Trump who had a wife at home, with their newborn son?

Why should she be apologetic for being a sex worker when she has built a business — acting, directing, producing, writing — that has made enough money for her to support herself and her family?

Why should she accept being vilified, just because that makes people more comfortable?

The truth remains, not many women can sustain this bold posture. The New York Time's in-court observer Jessica Bennett catches the ambivalence many women feel in sexual encounters with oblivious men who seem to assume that sex ratifies their power over women.

... “The room spun in slow motion”; “I was staring up at the ceiling”; “I was ashamed” — will remind a lot of women not of family men, but of stories about unwanted but perhaps not entirely nonconsensual encounters that many of us harbor. ...

This had me running to figure out how many of the jurors were women. (Five of twelve it turns out.) I suspect that it would be hard to find sexually active women to be on the jury who had not had the experience of lying there, feeling no emotional connection to the guy, and wondering when this would be over. And the men in this drama, judges and lawyers, may not even know enough to look for those women.

I'm an old lady lesbian and this may be nowadays a less common experience, but perhaps not.

Finally, Amanda Marcotte at Salon thinks journalists, especially male journalists, have learned something from #MeToo that is coloring their coverage.

... What the press coverage of Stormy Daniels' testimony shows is that journalists have a far more developed understanding of how to place an experience like what she recalled into context. It may not have been a sexual assault by the legal definition — and Daniels has repeatedly denied that is what it was — but alongside other stories, it fleshes out a picture of Trump as a man with coercive tendencies. (Something he brags about publicly when talking about matters outside of sexuality.) This matters in helping the public understand the complexities when it comes to issues like sexual violence and consent. But it also matters in understanding this specific criminal case.

Trump's team demanded a mistrial after Daniels testified, arguing that the vivid telling of the ugly encounter was prejudicial. Judge Juan Merchan denied the request, as well he should have. As unpleasant as it was for everyone to hear about how Trump pressured Daniels into unwanted sex, it was necessary to establish the prosecution's case. As MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin explained on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" Wednesday, the prosecution wants "the jury to understand is what the impact of her story would have been, had Michael Cohen, in the final days of the campaign, not rushed to reach settlement with her."

There's much more to come in this legal joust.