Democracy Has Prevailed.

January 20, 2018

The Donald Trump/Stephanie Clifford/Ben Roethlisberger Story And How Far It's Gotten (so far)

Let's first look locally.

The P-G:
Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger is mentioned in a former adult film actress’s account of an alleged affair she had with Donald Trump in 2006, according to an interview transcript published Friday by “In Touch” magazine.

In recalling her affair with Mr. Trump, Stephanie Clifford — who goes by the stage name Stormy Daniels — said she remembers meeting Mr. Roethlisberger at a hotel in Lake Tahoe, Nev., the night after she first had sex with Mr. Trump. She said Mr. Roethlisberger was “hanging out with” Mr. Trump, then a real estate businessman in town for a charity golf tournament.
You should probably read the interview. Ms Clifford comes off as a steady and reliable narrator for her time with Trump.  Julian Routh of the P-G quotes this paragraph from the transcript:
We hung out for a little while and he just kept saying, “I’m gonna call you, I’m gonna call you. I have to see you again. You’re amazing. We have to get you on [The Apprentice].” I ended up leaving and the next night I saw him again at a party. It was in the downstairs of the hotel I was in and he was hanging out with Ben Roethlisberger. When I got there, he was already with him. He had Keith, his bodyguard, call me and ask me if I was coming. When I got there, I called Keith and he told me where he was sitting and he brought me over. And he was hanging out with Ben for a long time. A couple other people around, nobody famous. Mostly people trying to hang on to them. Ben had just won the Super Bowl that year. Donald excused himself. He had to leave, I don’t remember why, and he made Ben promise to take care of me. I stayed another 15-20 minutes and Ben Roethlisberger actually walked me up to my room that night because Donald told him to. Yeah, he walked me all the way to my hotel room.
And for the record, that's the extent of Ben Roethlisberger's interaction with the happy temp-couple in that interview.

And the "Keith" in Ms Clifford's narrative? That would probably be Keith Schiller, Trump's then head of security.

Now that we have the basics out of the way, who's printed this story?
And so on.  These were all posted on January 19.

Do I really need to point out that I wrote about this on January 15?

There's one bit of dissonance between my blog post of the 15th and Clifford's interview. Clifford said that the dinner was just the two of them and in Trump's hotel room. I quoted the Smoking Gun with this:
At the time Clifford met Trump, she was between marriages and living with Michael Mosny, who later became her second husband. In a series of interviews, Mosny recalled that after Clifford met Trump at the Nevada golf tournament--where she had dinner one night with the mogul and Roethlisberger--she maintained contact with the businessman.
While in the interview says that she met Roethlisberger the next night, after the sex, when he walked her home.

So which is it?

My guess is that her response is closer to the truth than Mosny's - if only because Mosny's only relating what he remembers of what Clifford told him.  There's lotsa room in there for years-old memories to get skewed.

All that aside, NONE of the above news sources caught the fact that Ben played at least one round of golf with Trump at that tournament. Was it before or after the sex? Did they partake in any "locker room talk" on the links? Has Trump at any point then or since said to Roethlisberger, "Hey, you know that blonde porn star I got you to walk home that night? Yea, I banged her. Me, 60 years old and I'm banging a porn star."

Because you can totally see him bragging that.

Can someone please put a camera in Ben Roethlisberger's face and ask him what he knows about this?

UPDATE: The headline of this blog post has been corrected. Apologies all around for getting Ms Clifford's name wrong.


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