Why Stormy Daniels Isn’t Getting the Monica Lewinsky Treatment

Stormy Daniels makes no apologies. Not on social media, where she’s quick to clap back at ugly memes and derogatory jabs. And not in a courtroom, where, on a witness stand in Donald Trump’s hush money trial this week, she proudly described her pornography career, defended herself from charges of money-grubbing and deflected criticism of a strip club tour called “Make America Horny Again.”

Sex scandals have come a long way since the Bill Clinton days.

That’s a major takeaway from this week’s courtroom spectacle, when Daniels calmly testified about hotel room dalliances and sexual positions and the clumsy come-ons from a future U.S. president — and the media took copious notes. In some ways, the excitement around the trial was a throwback to the political and legal scandals of the 1990s, when Clinton’s alleged sexual harassment and illicit affairs led to lawsuits, investigations and impeachment. Then, as now, there was breathless interest from the press, aw-shucks reporting of salacious details, palpable glee from late-night comedians.

But there’s also a crucial difference. The women at the center of the 1990s scandals, Paula Jones, who sued Clinton for sexual harassment in the mid-1990s, and Monica Lewinsky, the intern at the center of Clinton’s impeachment, were mocked and belittled, frequently dismissed, dragged unwittingly into the arena and left to suffer there alone. At one memorable point in the saga, Jones broke down crying at a press conference; the spotlight was too harsh, the pressure was too much.

At Trump’s trial, it was his longtime aide Hope Hicks who sobbed under pressure on the witness stand. Daniels, the woman with the bedroom stories, seemed unfazed. That says something about her own personality: confident, defiant, sex-positive. But it also says something about a culture that gives her more freedom to present herself that way — and the tools to push back at her detractors.

Anyone who lived through the Clinton scandals remembers the deep unkindness to the women at their center, and the power dynamics that made the cruelty possible. A 1998 Wall Street Journal editorial called Lewinsky a “little tart.” Men with late-night television megaphones mocked Lewinsky’s weight and Jones’ nose. Men at the center of politics made dismissive statements that revealed as much class snobbery as misogyny: James Carville famously said of Jones, “Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find.”

Today, Trump’s defense attorneys are using the same playbook to try to neutralize Daniels’ testimony, arguing that she was an unsavory character, looking for extortion money, when she took a $130,000 payment for hiding her story. But Daniels cuts a decidedly different figure. She’s older, for one, and battle-tested. But she’s also far less capable of being shamed. Her long career in the adult film industry, where she rose from actress to director and impresario, inoculates her from much of the knee-jerk derision. It also gives her a sense of agency that Lewinsky and Jones never had, and the freedom to push back at old slut-shaming tropes. In the courtroom on Thursday, when Trump’s defense attorney took a backhanded jab at Daniels’ career —"So you have a lot of experience making phony stories about sex appear real?" — Daniels had a quick, unbothered reply. “The sex is real,” she said. "That's why it’s pornography."

That perfunctory defiance helps explain why, while Daniels has been at center of late-night jokes this week, she’s seldom been the butt of them. On “The Daily Show,” host Jordan Klepper focused on Trump himself and the media’s oddball fascination: “You’re very prudish for people whose names sound like porn names,” he said, after playing a clip of CNN’s Dana Bash and Jake Tapper, acting like the trial coverage made them squeamish. On ABC, Jimmy Kimmel focused on the circus itself: “The judge said Stormy could testify about her sexual relationship with Trump, but also said, ‘We don’t need to know the details.’ … Yes, we do need to know the details. Some of us are trying to host a show here, OK?” (Daniels’ Thursday testimony about a paranormal reality show and a supposedly-haunted house that was actually occupied by a possum might provide a fresh round of fodder, but it won’t be about sex).

It's fair to wonder whether the mainstream media would be so credulous of Daniels, or so relatively kind, if someone other than Trump were on trial. Indeed, some of Trump’s right-wing media defenders have been less hesitant to challenge Daniels’ credibility. On Fox News this week, the female host Kennedy made an old-school jab: “Her being surprised that she was going to a hotel room alone with a man to have body congress is like Pete Sampras being surprised at being invited to a tennis court and you want to see his serve.”

Still, it’s clear that, for many outlets, the ground rules around covering sexual dynamics have changed. The #MeToo scandal shone a light on power differentials and forced some revisionist thinking in the media and beyond — creating possibilities that never existed in the 1990s, says Leora Tanenbaum, an expert on slut-shaming whose books include “SLUT! Growing up Female with a Bad Reputation.”

Back then, “we didn’t even have the language to describe being trashed as a result of the sexual double standard,” Tanenbaum wrote in an email. “It was normalized to hold the mindset that boys will be boys — and girls will be sluts. As a result, there’s nothing these women could have done differently at the time to be taken seriously.”

This shift has no doubt been aided by other changes in the past few decades — for one, social media. It takes a fair amount of fortitude to play in an arena where body-shaming and generalized cruelty are still the standard currency, but Daniels uses her accounts with confidence, honing her straight-shooting persona and pushing back at critics who want to reduce her to sexist tropes. When someone recently wrote on X, “it’s crazy your greatest life achievement is fornication with a married man,” Daniels shot back, “True! He was married to me and the achievement is our daughter.” If Jones and Lewinsky had had the power to correct rumors in real time, and speak in their own voices, one wonders how different the ’90s would have been.

Still, Tanenbaum cautions against claiming too much progress. There’s still a double standard, she contends, when it comes to women talking about sex: When Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion performed their explicit song “WAP” at the 2021 Grammy Awards, the Federal Communications Commission received over 1,000 complaints. And Tanenbaum takes issue with the media for always identifying Daniels as a “porn star” or “adult film actress,” which she says conditions readers to think she can’t be taken seriously. “Her profession is not relevant at all to this criminal trial unless you believe that women who work in the sex industry are untrustworthy,” Tanenbaum says.

But there are signs that, as it works through every angle of the Trump trial story, the press is treating adult film workers with a newfound respect. On CNN on Tuesday, Tapper conducted a strikingly conventional interview with another porn actress, Alana Evans, who had been at Lake Tahoe around the time of Daniels’ first encounter with Trump. There was no indication that it was anything but an ordinary chat with an ordinary cable news guest.

More broadly, in the political world, people from unlikely corners are starting to push back against the stigmas around women and sex. Last winter, freshman U.S. Rep. Brandon Williams (R-N.Y.) told POLITICO that two former aides were threatening to expose his daughter’s OnlyFans account. And in Virginia last fall, a state delegate candidate only narrowly lost her race after a tape surfaced of her performing a sex act online. She said she might run for office again.

Lewinsky herself has capitalized on the media and cultural reckoning to present new sides of herself, penning Vanity Fair essays, advising a TV series on the Clinton scandal and positioning herself as an expert on bullying. On social media, she’s both playful and pointed about the past, jumping on Taylor Swift memes to make digs at her old tormentors.

Her rehabilitation is, by now, a given. And it comes with a flip side: A newfound skepticism of scandal-ridden male politicians whose instinct is to deny, deny, deny. If Stormy Daniels’ testimony serves her well — in the court of public opinion, if not the court of law — it will be a sign of how much the dynamics have changed. It’s easy to wallow in the salacious of details of a TV-worthy scandal. But just because it’s entertaining doesn’t mean it’s all a joke.