Despite receiving a cease-and-desist letter in late March from a lawyer representing Michael Cohen, Stormy Daniels on Tuesday released an artist’s sketch of the man who, she says, threatened her to keep quiet about her alleged affair with Donald Trump seven years ago in a Las Vegas parking lot. The threat came face-to-face, in the presence of Daniels’ then-infant daughter, according to Daniels' account.
The sketch, by top forensic artist Lois Gibson, may be seen at the top of this page. The Houston, Texas based Gibson has been named by The Guinness Book of World Records as the “world’s most successful forensic artist,” with her sketches used to identify 751 wanted criminals and playing a part in more than 1,000 criminal convictions.
“His face is burned in my memory,” Daniels said in an an interview with the ABC-TV program The View on Tuesday morning. “I was really rattled. It just never left me.”
The man is “handsome and fit with sandy brown, slicked-back hair. He’s about 5-foot-9 to 6 feet tall, and in his 30s and 40s,” according to Daniels’ description, which resulted in the Gibson sketch. She also said that he was “well-dressed ... nothing was alarming about the way he looked at first.”
When she appeared on the CBS-TV 60 Minutes broadcast on March 25, Daniels described the incident on detail.
“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,” she 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.”
The following day, Daniels and her lawyer Michael Avenatti received a letter from Brent Blakely, a lawyer representing Cohen, Trump’s self-described “fixer” who in 2016 made a $130,000 payoff to Daniels to keep her quiet about the alleged Trump affair. The letter demanded that Daniels and Avenatti stop talking about the threat calling the allegation “false and defamatory”—despite the fact that Daniels and Avenatti never said that Cohen was behind the threat.
Avenatti announced on Tuesday that he is offering a $100,000 reward for “credible information” about the man who threatened Daniels. He said that he has created an email address, [email protected], where tipsters can submit leads.
Image courtesy Michael Avenatti
