Full Disclosure

SEVEN

At first, I figured it had to be about the cigarettes. Glen quit smoking the day our daughter was born, so maybe that was the problem. Then I thought it was lack of sleep and the stress of being a parent to a newborn after a traumatic delivery—all of those things are very normal. Because within the first few days of her life, Glen went completely, well, insane.

I like to say I didn’t get postpartum depression, but he did. He wasn’t sleeping, which wasn’t really so much because of our having a baby in the house, because she was such a good sleeper from the beginning. I remember standing by her crib, whispering, “For the love of God, wake up! My tits are gonna explode.”

Glen would appear manic, starting a project and leaving it unfinished because he moved on to another one. “Sit down, Glen,” I said countless times, “you’re making me nervous.” He would look at her and start crying and get emotional.

Finally, he broke down. “I always had a problem with the fact that my dad never said ‘I love you,’” he told me. “Now that I have her, and I look at her, I can’t imagine why a parent wouldn’t tell a child that they loved them. I can’t imagine a day going by without saying it to her. So I am going to make sure I tell her every single day that I love her.”

(Now she is like, “I get it.” Because he tells her a hundred times a day. There will never be a doubt in my mind that my daughter knows her father loves her.)

Glen’s intense love and adoration for our perfect baby girl brought up painful memories from his childhood. He was having what he thought were nightmares, which he came to feel were repressed memories of abuse he went through as a kid. The memories were triggered by seeing how vulnerable our daughter was, and he coped by using alcohol. He told me he had thoughts of suicide, feeling he was unworthy of having a family. He was drinking all day every day and having a lot of problems with his band.

And I had a newborn and I’d gained ninety-three pounds. I was still leaking out of everywhere, and I had had the whole plan that I would deliver naturally—not two weeks late by cesarean—and do some miracle snapback in time to be at the January AVN Awards, my industry’s version of the Oscars.

In the middle of this shit blizzard, my phone rang. I was holding my daughter in our living room, probably wearing the same shirt I’d worn yesterday.

“Daniels. Spears. Wassup?”

I recognized Randy Spears’s voice immediately. He had been at Wicked during the Trump time. He had recently left the business, but had married and then divorced a woman who was a porn veteran, Gina Rodriguez. She’s found her real calling as an entertainment manager with a specialty for handling mistresses, secret sexters, and D-listers looking to either extend their fifteen minutes of fame or at least get a payoff. Her big break was the slew of Tiger Woods mistresses selling their sexts and stories to the highest tabloid bidders.

“Hey, so I was just talking about you and somehow it came up,” he said, “that you knew Donald Trump.”

I rolled my eyes but said nothing. Somehow. I really liked Randy, but it did me no good to talk.

“Gina wants to talk to you about it,” he said. Glen was outside, and I didn’t want to risk having this conversation in front of him.

“I’m really not—”

This bright voice came on. “You know, I could probably help you tell your story.”

“No, I am not interested.”

“Well, my partner Gloria Allred wants to talk to you.”

“Who is that?”

I was probably the only person on the planet who didn’t know who this person was. I know now that she’s a lawyer who specializes in high-profile cheating and harassment scandals. She worked with Gina on presenting Joslyn James as a former mistress seeking an apology from Tiger Woods for leading her on.

“Look her up,” Gina said. “I gave her your number.”

Sure enough, Gloria Allred called me. I was folding baby clothes in the living room. My daughter was on her back on a blanket next to me, and I sent Glen out on a Walmart run.

“Okay, what’s your story?” Gloria said.

I paused. I wanted to tell her that I was an accomplished star, writer, and director of adult films, plus I had just had a baby who was clearly exceptional because I had seen other brats in my day. And my hot husband was going through a lot, but I loved him and he adored our child. Oh, and I had to lose ninety-three pounds because the AVN Awards, my industry’s biggest night of the year, was in a couple of weeks and those bitches were just waiting for me to roll in. Meanwhile, yes, I was still leaking out of places.

But I knew she didn’t care about that.

I barreled through an extremely abbreviated version of my interactions with Donald Trump, leaving out sex and anything in the least bit interesting.

“Is there anything more?” she asked.

“No,” I said, putting a finger close to my daughter’s hand so she could hold it.

“Well, I really can’t do anything for you if that’s all there is.”

“Sorry,” I said.

I hung up and that was that, right? A couple of months went by, and I was still trying to lose the weight and fully recover so I could go back to work. I did two years’ worth of work in one year in anticipation of being out of commission for a while, but I hadn’t counted on my daughter being late and me needing a cesarean.

In March 2011, I got another call from Gina. “Oh, my God,” she said, panic in her voice. “Have you seen the internet?”

That seemed so strange. Like she was asking if I was familiar with this new and exciting invention where people can find facts and naked pictures.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“There’s a story about you and Trump on The Dirty,” she said.

“The what?”

“The Dirty,” she said. “It’s a gossip site.”

“How is there a story about me on there?”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “Do you want me to ask my attorney to have it removed?”

“What are you talking about? What does it say?” I went over to my computer and was trying to find it online when she started reading it to me, saying I had had an affair with Trump. It said a friend leaked it.

“So, do you want my attorney, Keith Davidson, to send them a letter?”

“YES!” I yelled. It seemed perfect. My only thought was, This needs to go away. Glen was a mess, I was a mess—we were in no position to suddenly have a spotlight on us.

The story was down in a couple of hours. Now that I have seen so many incorrect things about me printed and posted, I realize that is fast. Extremely fast.

That’s how Keith Davidson entered my life. I didn’t know that Davidson’s specialty was brokering sex tapes and the like. At the time, it just seemed like I’d been saved from humiliation. Glen was not going to be looking at a gossip website I had never heard of. I had shut it down.

It was quiet, and I went back to the work of getting in shape. Twice a week, I did MamaFit workout classes, where I could take my daughter with me. I was trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. I was also trying to help Glen get his life back in order. He’d been through a lot and was starting to think he would benefit from professional help. Which costs money, which meant I had to get back to work.

Just a couple of weeks after Keith and Gina came to my rescue taking down the story from The Dirty, I got a call from In Touch. And now they had the story. This stranger on the phone told me my story. They had about 80 percent of the details and made it all a little more sensational around the edges. Like a romance novel version of some hot and heavy affair. Um, are you into sharks? I thought.

“I have no comment,” I said. “I’m not talking.”

“Well, we’re going to run the story anyway,” I recall the person saying. “So, you have two options: You can either tell us the story in your words and get compensated for it. Or we’ll run the version we have, which may or may not be accurate, and someone else gets the money.”

“I don’t…” I said.

“Well, think about it.”

Who was this “someone else” telling my story? People think I approached In Touch with the story, but I never would have done that. I called Gina in a panic, and she put it in my head that it was my ex-husband Mike Moz. He did seem like a good candidate, and I 100 percent believed her at the time. He was smart enough to have come up with the plan, and he had about 80 percent of the story. It all pointed directly to him.

“I could get you fifteen thousand dollars for this story,” Gina said. “Do you really want to hand him fifteen grand?”

“Well, no.”

“It’s going to come out anyway, so you might as well have control over it and compensation,” she said. “We can make a ton of money and you can have them make the check out to your daughter.”

We were running out of money and nothing had worked the way it was supposed to. And also, my feeling was Fuck you, Mike Moz. I didn’t want him profiting off my life any more than he already had.

I agreed to do an interview, which I did over the phone. I talked about Trump’s promise to get me on The Apprentice but left out his plan to help me once I was on the show. We talked for an hour to this nice girl who asked me things like “Was the sex romantic?” I know even she has been in the media echo chamber, repeatedly telling her story about me telling my story, but I wouldn’t remember her name if you put a gun to my head. When that was done, I got another call from an editor at In Touch.

“You know, this writer put this together,” said the editor, “and it seems so far-fetched. Is this real?”

“Yeah.” What seemed so far-fetched? Was it the spanking? Shark Week? That I had a brain?

“Well, you’re gonna have to take a lie detector test.”

“Are you calling me a liar?”

“We’d like to be sure.”

“Fuck, yeah,” I said, because I hate being called a liar. Later that month, I went to take a lie detector test, and a polygraph expert named Ron Slay asked me about a hundred questions. He later submitted a sworn statement that read like a report card. “Ms. Clifford presented herself well in outward appearance of credibility,” said Slay. “There were no observable indications of intent to deceive.” And then the money shot: “In the opinion of this examiner Ms. Clifford is truthful about having unprotected vaginal intercourse with Donald Trump in July 2006.” Ding, ding, ding—told ya I wasn’t a liar.

Gina called. She was cooking up a plan. “Let this In Touch thing come out,” she said, “and then you’re going to go quiet and everyone’s going to be trying to take a picture of you.”

“Oh, God, no,” I said.

“And then we can sell a photo shoot of you.”

“No photo shoots of me,” I said. “I look so bad.”

Gina wasn’t listening. She was excited about all the TV shows she was going to shop my story to. She said that after the In Touch interview, she had some British tabloid lined up to pay half a million dollars for my story.

I hung up and said to myself, This cannot happen. Mainly because I still hadn’t told Glen. I would think about it in the middle of the night, but come morning I always lost my nerve. Glen’s behavior had become so erratic that I didn’t dare add any additional stress to him. He was talking about us being better off without him, and he wasn’t just talk. One day I was driving with him when he suddenly opened the passenger-side door and made a move to jump out. I grabbed him by the belt, screaming at him as I drove with one hand and slowed down.

I didn’t know what this would do to him. I had been secretly hoping I would somehow fail the lie detector test and the whole story would go away. I’d be out the money, but fifteen thousand dollars was pennies compared to what I would be spending going forward. The only reason I was doing it was because of that “someone else” willing to tell my story.

Finally, I started easing Glen into it, doing some of the worst acting of my entire life.

“Hey, so, I met Donald Trump a long time ago,” I told him one morning while our daughter was napping. Keep going, Stormy. “I had dinner with him.”

“Did you fuck him?” he shot back.

“Nooooo,” I said, like the idea was preposterous. “I mean, he wanted to, so there might be a way that… anyway.” I dropped it. We were all hanging by a thread. I started doing some magical thinking and decided it was in the realm of possibility that Glen would never see an In Touch magazine. Yeah.

Speaking of, my “friends” at In Touch called again. They said they were excited about the story. “Even though you passed the lie detector test,” said the editor, “we have to do due diligence and see if Mr. Trump wants to comment.”

Well, that would make it real for sure. And I couldn’t very well say, “Oh, God, don’t do that.” That wouldn’t be right. I said I understood. When I hung up, I looked at my baby girl lying on the floor.

“Let’s see how this goes,” I said to her.

I was running late for my usual MamaFit class. I had been going religiously, twice a week, for months. It was in a complex of buildings with pre- and postnatal wellness programs. A one-stop shop for birthing ladyparts, with massage, prenatal yoga, mommy-and-me workout classes, and high-end boutiquey things. A lot of doulas and midwives kept offices there. I had found it on Facebook when I asked around for a workout class for new moms.

As I pulled in to the parking lot, I saw this guy walking around. My first thought was, That guy is really hot. He’s someone’s husband. He was looking around, which I took to mean that he was lost in this land of ladies and moms.

I pulled into a space that would leave the passenger side open for me to get my daughter out. I always had her in the backseat on the passenger side, in a rear-facing car seat. I was in a rush, so I got out and ran around the back of the car to get to her. It was really windy, which happens in Vegas, so my hair was blowing in my face as I leaned into the car. My daughter dropped her toy, so I grabbed it and held it in my teeth while I fiddled with her car-seat buckle. I was basically the picture of a frustrated, harried mom.

A man came up behind me. I saw his Converse shoes first. They were navy blue and someone had drawn a star on them. Like a kid, or maybe he doodled. I turned around, taking the toy out of my teeth. It was the hot guy. He was in profile, my side to his. My eyes went up from the cool Converse, and I noticed his jeans looked expensive with a nice wash. He had both hands in his gray hoodie, which also looked expensive, with an asymmetrical zipper at the collar. His hood was down, and by the time I got to the face I was sold. He looked like a cross between Kevin Bacon, Jon Bon Jovi, and Keith Urban. A sharp, angular face like my husband Glen’s, but even better built. He had a very kissable mouth. Like if you were talking to him in a bar, you would be like, “I really just want to touch your lips.”

I thought he was going to ask me how to get to his wife’s Lamaze class. Like, “I’m running late and all of these buildings look alike.” He looked like he belonged to a woman, and nobody in three-hundred-dollar jeans asks you for a dollar. I have seen Vegas crackheads coming up to me. Not this.

“Beautiful little girl you got there,” he said, leaning in to look right at my daughter.

I was readying to say, “Oh, thanks, what building are you looking for?” to save him the trouble of asking me. But he kept going.

“It’d really be a shame if something happened to her mom,” he said, still looking just at her. “Forget the story. Leave Mr. Trump alone.”

He walked away, and it took me a few seconds for his words to even register. His hands stayed in his hoodie pockets. Did he want me to think he had a weapon? I looked around and he was gone. I got my daughter out of the car and I ran inside.

It wasn’t until I was in the elevator that I thought, That guy just threatened to kill me. I stood in the center of the elevator. My face went numb and I couldn’t feel my feet. I began to shake uncontrollably, and I almost dropped the baby.

I got off on the floor, got to the class, and headed straight to the bathroom. I must have looked crazy, because the instructor yelled after me, “Are you okay?”

“She had a blowout,” I said, “be there in a minute.” I was afraid to tell anyone. Alone in the bathroom, I held my baby close, instinctively covering her head as I stared at myself in the mirror. I was shaking still, but less now. Part of me was marveling that someone had just threatened us and dropped Mr. Trump’s name.

Another part of me was just a really mad mom. That motherfucker thought that was a threat? What kind of a bad guy is that? What hit man wears sexy jeans? It just didn’t make any sense to me. If he had looked at all like a threat, I wouldn’t have gotten out of the car, and if I’d caught a bad vibe, I definitely would have closed my daughter’s door to protect her.

“It’s okay,” I told my daughter. I said it again, this time to myself.

I went and did the class, telling no one what happened in the parking lot. I went back to the same coping mechanism I’ve always trusted: keep it moving and solve this on your own. When I left, I walked alongside people, and I scanned the lot before getting in the car. I repeatedly checked the rearview on the way home. People want to know why I didn’t immediately go to the police. If you want to make a police report, it’s public. This is how I imagined it would go:

“Hi, I’d like to make a report about some guy who came up and threatened me.”

“Okay, what did he say?” I picture the cop as genial but by-the-book.

“He said this and this and ‘leave Mr. Trump alone.’”

“Why would someone tell you to leave Mr. Trump alone?”

“Okay, it’s funny. I had sex with Donald Trump and now I’m selling a story, well, someone else was trying to sell my story and I got caught up in it and I know they’ve reached out to Trump for comment and…”

Which would mean the entire world would know, including my husband, who had just tried to throw himself out of a moving fucking car. I was afraid to open a can of worms by telling Glen about the threat. Would he start to get paranoid about me leaving the house? I needed my freedom and, besides, I was used to caring for myself. Listen, if this guy had broken into my house or held me at knifepoint, I would have been like, Fuck it, that outweighs it. I would have gone right to the police. So, I kept it secret.

That seemed like the right decision soon enough, because In Touch disappeared on me. I called the girl who did the interview and she never answered the phone or returned my calls. Same with the editor. When I called Gina to see if she had heard anything, she ghosted me, too. It struck me as bizarre, because Gina was all about getting that money. I gave up contacting them, because part of me was actually relieved. Fifteen grand wasn’t enough money to ruin my life.

And I hadn’t told Glen. He and our daughter were my only concern. I had all the contacts that Gina had talked up as wanting to pay me crazy amounts of money once the In Touch story came out, but I didn’t bother. None of the money seemed worth it. I let it go, content to let Donald Trump recede into the past.