'Stormy' reveals the flawed feminist icon looming over Trump's trial

Source: Deccan Herald

New York: In an impressive bit of narrative synergy last week, significant judicial decisions in the Manhattan district attorney's hush-money case against Donald Trump coincided with the premiere of a documentary, Stormy, about the woman at the center of it all. Hours before the film was screened at 3 Dollar Bill, a Brooklyn nightclub, a state court judge ruled that the prosecution's star witness -- Trump's long-ago fixer and eventual turncoat Michael Cohen -- could testify at the upcoming trial despite the former president's objections.

The court granted the same permission to Stormy Daniels, the porn actor, director, author and resistance stripper to whom Trump, according to the 34-count indictment against him, funneled $130,000 to keep secret a sexual encounter between them.

Stormy, which is streaming on Peacock, comes to us from filmmakers Erin Lee Carr and Sarah Gibson, who have focused their work on women bruised by the legal system, and they see Daniels' story unfolding in that same tradition. Whether viewers will too turns out to depend on more than the revulsion so many Americans feel for the former president -- a testament to filmmakers who see beyond their own obvious sympathies and beyond the narrative of ad hoc feminist heroism that has built up around Daniels to explore some of the mess and contradiction animating her.