NEW YORK (news agencies) — After 22 witnesses, including a porn actor, tabloid publisher and White House insiders, testimony is over at Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York.
Prosecutors called 20 witnesses. The defense called just two. Trump decided not to testify on his own behalf.
The trial now shifts to closing arguments, scheduled for Tuesday.
After that, it will be up to 12 jurors to decide whether prosecutors have proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump falsified his company’s business records as part of a broader effort to keep stories about marital infidelity from becoming public during his 2016 presidential campaign. He has pleaded not guilty and denies any wrongdoing.
A conviction could come down to how the jurors interpret the testimony and which witnesses they find credible. The jury must be unanimous. The records involved include 11 checks sent to Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, as well as invoices and company ledger entries related to those payments.
Here’s a look at key trial witnesses and what they had to say:
As Trump sat feet away, the porn actor, writer and director, gave a detailed and at times graphic account of a sexual encounter she says she had with Trump in Nevada in 2006. After they met at a celebrity golf tournament, she said, Trump invited her to dinner but then engaged her in conversation in his hotel room and startled her by stripping to his underwear while she was in the bathroom.
“I felt the room spin in slow motion. I felt the blood basically leave my hands and my feet,” Daniels testified. “I just thought, ‘Oh, my God, what did I misread to get here?’ Because the intention was pretty clear, somebody stripped down in their underwear and posing on the bed, like waiting for you.”
Daniels said Trump did not physically threaten her, but “my own insecurities in that moment kept me from saying no.” Daniels said she kept in touch with Trump for about a year in hopes of appearing on his TV show “The Apprentice,” but it never happened.
Daniels spoke about accepting $15,000 for a magazine interview in 2011. The story was not printed at the time but ended up on a gossip website without her consent. Her lawyer, in consultation with Cohen, complained and had the story taken down.
In 2016, Daniels authorized her manager to shop her story again but found little interest until the release of the infamous “Access Hollywood” recording of Trump boasting about grabbing women’s genitals without their permission.
Daniels told the jury she accepted $130,000 from Cohen in the final weeks of the election in exchange for a legal agreement to keep the claim to herself.
Trump’s lawyers grilled Daniels about her motivation, eliciting testimony that she hates the former Republican president. She pushed back on the defense’s suggestion that her story was fabricated, saying if it was fiction, “I would have written it to be a lot better.”
Daniels’ testimony was among the most awaited in the trial. She had shared her story before, but this was the first time she testified about it in front of Trump. Trump’s lawyers objected to much of Daniels’ testimony and twice sought a mistrial, arguing that her feelings of a power imbalance with Trump and her blunt answers about the alleged sexual encounter should not have been put before the jury.
A longtime Trump friend, Pecker was the publisher of the National Enquirer and chief executive of its parent company, American Media Inc., during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Pecker told the jury he agreed to be the “eyes and ears” of Trump’s campaign, looking out for damaging stories so they could be suppressed. He said he agreed to the role — and to a plan to publish positive stories about Trump and negative stories about his opponents — at an August 2015 meeting with Trump and Cohen.
“If there were any rumors in the marketplace about Mr. Trump or his family or any negative stories that were coming out or anything that I heard overall,” Pecker said, “I would call Michael Cohen directly.”
He said he told the National Enquirer’s editor at the time, Dylan Howard, “that we are going to try to help the campaign, and to do that, I want to keep this as quiet as possible.”
Pecker testified that the company squashed one potential story by paying $30,000 to a Trump Tower doorman. It paid $150,000 to former Playboy model Karen McDougal, to keep her from going public with a claim that she had had a yearlong affair with Trump.
But when Daniels came forward, Pecker said, he told Howard: “I am not a bank, and we are not paying out any further disbursements or monies.”
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