On January 10, a decision will be made on the sentence for US President-elect Donald Trump, said Judge Juan Merchan, adding that he was not willing to impose a prison sentence. Earlier, the politician was found guilty by a jury of concealing payments for the silence of porn actress Stormy Daniels. This means that the verdict will be announced 10 days before his swearing-in.
In May, a jury in state court in Manhattan, New York, found Trump guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records in connection with concealing payment for porn actress Stormy Daniels' silence during the 2016 election campaign about their alleged sexual relationship.
Trump's lawyers argued that the case should be dismissed due to the Supreme Court's ruling on presidential immunity. But in mid-December, Judge Juan Merchan, who presided over Trump's bribery trial, denied the president-elect's request USA to dismiss the case.
The court's decision 10 days before the presidential inauguration
On Friday, Juan Merchan decided that the president-elect would hear the verdict on January 10. He said, quoted by Reuters, that he was not willing to impose a prison sentence, and the politician could appear in person or virtually at the trial.
The hearing is scheduled 10 days before Trump's presidential inauguration in Washington on January 20. Reuters comments that this is “an unprecedented scenario in US history.”
Donald Trump LLISON ROBBERT/PAP/EPA
The story of Stormy Daniels and Donald Trump's relationship
The case of Trump's affair with a porn actress nicknamed Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, gained publicity in 2018. Then, in March, Daniels confirmed in an interview with CBS that a few days before the presidential election, Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohen, paid her $130,000 in exchange for silence about the sexual relationship they had.
In a 2018 interview with CBS, Stormy Daniels reported that she met Trump at a charity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, Nevada in July 2006. She claimed that Trump, then 60, invited her to dinner and then they went to his hotel room, where they had sex. Trump's wife, Melania, was not supposed to be there because she had given birth to the couple's son shortly before. Later, Trump allegedly invited Daniels, then 27, to an event in California and to his office in Trump Tower in New York. In 2007, Trump allegedly met with Daniels at his Beverly Hills home and talked to her about her participation in the reality show “Celebrity Apprentice,” which he hosted at the time. The woman ultimately did not appear in the program.
In 2011, Daniels gave an interview to In Touch magazine, in which she described her meetings with Trump. However, the conversation did not see the light of day because – as the newspaper's employees told CBS News – after Trump was asked to comment on the case, his lawyer threatened to sue the magazine. Daniels claims that a few weeks after her interview with In Touch, she was intimidated – a stranger approached her and her daughter and told them to “leave Trump alone” and “forget about this story.”
Main photo source: LLISON ROBBERT/PAP/EPA