When Stormy Daniels gave her interview to the CBS News program 60 Minutes last month, she claimed that in 2011—when a magazine was actively pursuing her to sell the rights to her story about her affair with Donald Trump—a man accosted her in a Las Vegas parking lot and threatened her, ordering her not to talk about the Trump story.
Now Daniels is apparently working with a top forensic sketch artist to create an accurate drawing of the man who she says threatened her and her then-infant daughter seven years ago, according to a message posted by her attorney, Michael Avenatti, to his Twitter account.
UPDATE, April 9: Avenati on Monday said that he would offer a “significant reward” for information that leads to identifying the man who threatened Daniels seven years ago. The lawyer said that the composite forensic sketch of the man based on Daniels’ description would be made public on Tuesday, April 10. But he did not specify whether the sketch would be provided to law enforcement authorities, or how much reward money he considered to be “significant.” He added that the reward money would likely be drawn from a crowdfunding campaign.
Avenatti’s revelation that Daniels is collaborating with a top forensic artist came on the same day that he filed a new federal court motion to put Trump under oath in a deposition, also asking the United States Central District Court of California to grant Daniels an expedited jury trial in her lawsuit against Trump to end the confidentiality agreement she signed shortly before the 2016 presidential election.
Read the entire court document at this link. A hearing on the new motion to get sworn testimony from Trump is scheduled for May 7.
In the 60 Minutes interview, Daniels said that she still retains a clear recollection of the man’s appearance, though he was not someone she recognized, and his identity remains unknown. She ruled out Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, as the man who threatened her.
Cohen’s lawyer, Brent Blakely, has said that Cohen believes that the threat incident described by Daniels never actually occurred.
“I was in a parking lot, going to a fitness class with my infant daughter. Taking, you know, the seats facing backwards in the backseat, diaper bag, you know, gettin' all the stuff out,” Daniels told 60 Minutes interviewer Anderson Cooper. “And a guy walked up on me and said to me, ‘Leave Trump alone. Forget the story.’ And then he leaned around and looked at my daughter and said, ‘That's a beautiful little girl. It'd be a shame if something happened to her mom.’ And then he was gone.”
She said that the face-to-face threat left her hands shaking and did, in fact, scare her into refraining from notifying the police.
The interview aired on March 25. On Saturday, April 7, Avenatti took to his Twitter feed to hint that the man who made the threat would soon be identified.
“Expect a major announcement in the coming days regarding our efforts to identify the thug who threatened Ms. Clifford in Las Vegas in 2011 to 'leave Trump alone' while making reference to her little girl. You can run but you can’t hide,” Avenatti wrote on his Twitter feed.
The following day, Avenatti provided more detail, posting a picture on his Twitter feed of Daniels poring over forensic art samples as the artist, Lois Gibson, draws on an easel. Avenatti described Gibson as “the foremost forensic artist in the world.”
The image of Daniels and Gibson at work may be viewed at this link.
Gibson works for the Houston, Texas, police department. Her record of creating sketches that have been used to identify 751 wanted criminals and have also been part of prosecutors’ obtaining more than 1,000 criminal convictions makes her “the world’s most successful forensic artist,” according to The Guinness Book of World Records.
Gibson is also the author of co-author of two published books. Those books are Forensic Art Essentials, a manual for professional forensic artists; and Faces of Evil: Murderers, Kidnappers, Rapists and the Forensic Artist Who Puts Them Behind Bars a popularized true-crime book about her career and several of the most prominent cases in which her artwork has helped catch a criminal.
