Breaking News:Trump Boasted About Sex With Stormy in Tahoe, Athlete Says

Donald Trump boasted about having sex with adult film star Stormy Daniels at the 2006 golf tournament where the two met, a celebrity athlete who played the tournament has said.

The athlete also told The Daily Beast that a decade later, in the run-up to the 2016 election, he received anonymous calls from strangers asking what he remembered of the weekend.

Though Trump sometimes referred to Daniels indirectly as a “porn star,” the athlete said, he emphasized that it was understood among the golfers who heard the boasts that Trump, at the time best known as the host of reality TV show The Apprentice, was saying he had slept with Daniels.

“It was clear to me and everyone who heard him that he was talking about Stormy,” the athlete said, adding that Trump encouraged other celebs to try to have sex with Daniels, behavior the athlete described as “crass,” “gross,” and “stupid.”

“He’d say all these things like, ‘You’ve gotta bang a porn star, it’s incredible,’ and, ‘It added 20 yards to my drive today,’” the athlete told The Daily Beast.

The athlete said he has not shared his story widely, and that prosecutors never approached him. His account appears to be the first publicly reported description of Trump telling people he had sex with Daniels around the time Daniels says he did.

Asked for a response to the athlete’s claims, Trump campaign communications director Steven Cheung falsely blamed the athlete’s decision to come forward on President Joe Biden’s political team.

“The Biden campaign is in freakout mode and will try anything to cling to power,” Cheung said. “Crooked Joe Biden is a failed president trying to distract from his disastrous tenure. Publishing lies, rumors and innuendos are the hallmarks of losing campaigns and desperate failing media outlets trying to stay afloat. It’s time to Make America Great Again and re-elect President Trump.”

But though the athlete’s account may create personal and political embarrassment for Trump, his trial on charges arising from hush-money payments to Daniels is now reaching its end.

The veracity or otherwise of Daniels’ account did play a role. In opening remarks, for instance, Trump’s defense team argued that the encounter Daniels described might not have happened. They also argued, unsuccessfully, that parts of her testimony were grounds for a mistrial, then sought to discredit her version of events in an aggressive cross-examination.

Barb McQuade, a former U.S. Attorney and current professor at the University of Michigan School of Law, told The Daily Beast that in terms of the trial, she couldn’t immediately see substantial value in the athlete’s version of events, given the nature of the charges.

“It is a bit of a side issue, really,” McQuade said. “What matters is that business records were falsified within intent to conceal an undisclosed campaign contribution.”

While McQuade allowed that the athlete’s claim “bolsters the testimony of Stormy Daniels,” she was “not sure” if being able to prove the truth of Daniels’ allegation mattered as much as being able to prove that Trump “intended to conceal the allegation.”

While Daniels’ allegation was an important plank for Manhattan prosecutors who spent the last seven weeks building a criminal case against Trump, it wasn’t central to the charges.

District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg charged the former president for allegedly falsifying business records in service of covering up another crime—an alleged attempt to keep a lid on the $130,000 Trump’s former personal “fixer” Michael Cohen illegally paid Daniels the week before Election Day in 2016, thereby to keep the story from voters and boost Trump’s chances.

But another detail in the celebrity athlete’s account does seem to concern the hush payment.