Stormy Daniels’ Voir Dire

The thing to watch with the release on Monday of “Stormy,” the documentary about the adult film star Stephanie Clifford, known as “Stormy Daniels,” is what the jury might make of it. The film premiered at the South by Southwest festival last week, and will be beamed on Peacock beginning on Monday. President Trump’s criminal trial is set to begin in the middle of April, after being delayed from March 25. Ms. Clifford is at the center of the case. Before the trial date request was pushed off — with the blessing of District Attorney Alvin Bragg — this documentary was slated to air one week before jury selection and voir dire. The accusation from Mr. Bragg is that Mr. Trump, with the help of his erstwhile fixer, Michael Cohen, falsified business records to hide hush money payments to Ms. Clifford in order to secure victory in the 2016 election. It is, by our lights, a theory in search of a crime. Whatever case there is, though, Ms. Clifford, along with Cohen, who has already plead guilty to a fricassee of felonies, is in the middle of it. Now Ms. Clifford is dishing to the cameras before she takes the stand. How does this accord with the Constitution’s mandate that in criminal prosecutions the accused “shall enjoy the right to a … impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed”?Mr. Trump was always going to struggle to get a fair hearing at Manhattan. One of Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors, Joshua Steinglass, admitted as much at a hearing this month, declaring that “there is no chance that we’re going to find a single juror that doesn’t have a view of President Trump — former President Trump. He was the president. People know who he is.” Now, though, they are also likely as not to know Ms. Clifford’s version of who he is.The filmmakers, Sarah Gibson and Erin Lee Carr, said at SXSW that “It felt incredibly important to get this out sooner rather than later,” i.e., as we took it, before the trial. Ms. Clifford, who went onstage briefly at the premiere, was more direct, declaring “Fuck Trump.” She calls the 45th president an “orange hobgoblin” and accuses him of “humping away and telling me how great I was. It was awful. But I didn’t say no.”All of this strikes us as extraordinarily prejudicial and likely, whatever the intention, to poison the jury pool. Recall also that Ms. Clifford owes Mr. Trump more than $300,000 for a failed defamation suit brought by her former attorney Michael Avenatti, though she claims that the action was filed “without my permission and against my wishes.” Avenatti, another character in this sordid saga, is serving nearly two decades in federal prison. Ms. Clifford will debut her film Monday evening at Brooklyn, a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge from the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, where Mr. Trump will soon stand trial. Potential jurors, we reckon, could be in the room when Ms. Clifford takes the microphone. Our brief here is for due process. Yet we, like any newspaper, are allergic to prior restraints on speech or print. It would be nice to see other consequences.

Stormy Daniels’ Voir Dire

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