Adult film star and director Stormy Daniels provided graphic detail in her 2006 sexual encounter with Trump during her testimony Tuesday in Manhattan – but legal experts say whether the tryst ever happened is irrelevant to prosecutors' case and that Daniels' explicit testimony could provide fodder for Trump's appeal.
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"Whether they had sex and the details of that encounter, doesn't matter to the central question of whether he falsified payments, and whether he did it to win the election," Fordham Law School professor Cheryl Bader told Salon.
"Even if she made up the whole story, it doesn't give Trump license to violate campaign finance rules," Bader said.
Bader said prosecutors likely wanted to pump up the veracity of Daniels' story to make it easier for jurors to believe that Trump was trying to cover something up.
Prosecutors probably felt they could "sell the case better" if jurors believed the affair actually happened "rather than Daniels was making it up," Bader said. "What's relevant is that Trump was consumed with making sure the American people would never hear it, and therefore wouldn't believe it."