Stormy Daniels Tells Her Side During Duckworth’s Show

Former adult film star and memoirist Stormy Daniels, a tireless thorn in the side of President Donald Trump, wrapped up her tour in Charlotte on Sunday night at The Comedy Club at Duckworth’s in Uptown with a mix of stand-up comedy, sensational storytelling and a short Q&A session. 

Daniels, who started her porn career in 2002, was inducted into both the AVN Hall of Fame and the XRCO Hall of Fame in 2014. 

She has pivoted to become a different type of performer since the release of her 2018 book Full Disclosure, in which she gave her side of a controversy that sprang up earlier that year when the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s attorney had paid Daniels $130,000 in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election with the understanding that Daniels would deny that she had an affair with Trump a decade earlier in 2006. 

She joked Sunday that, because nobody reads anymore, she’s had to start doing comedy tours to get her stories out to the public. 

You may remember Daniels’ first foray into mainstream comedy, a short cameo she did for a dream sequence in the 2005 film The 40-Year-Old Virgin in which she pops up on screen for a short cameo via a dream sequence, telling Steve Carrell’s titular virgin character, “Hi Andy. I’m gonna talk dirty to you. I wanna have lots of sexy sex with you.”

The Stormy who’s touring now ain’t the same Stormy as 2005. On Sunday, she referred to herself as “hail-damaged” after years of media disputes, inept lawyers, a short-lived political candidacy and never-ending death threats from Donald Trump’s goons. 

Despite all she’s been through over the last two decades, Stormy can still tell a story. 

Entering the venue for the night’s event, I expected a room full of curious men but instead found an evenly split crowd — more women, if anything — waiting upstairs at Duckworth’s to see if the legend of Stormy Daniels held up in person.

The night began with a short set by local Charlotte comic Loic Adjevi-Neglokpe. He loosened the crowd up with jokes about Catholicism, witnessing someone drive while looking at ass pics and other bawdy humor. His set went over well, though it was clear that the crowd was eagerly waiting for the main event. 

“It felt a bit different knowing that they came mainly to see Stormy tell her story, so I mostly focused on just having fun and interacting a bunch with the audience in order to get them more comfortable,” he told me later. “I felt like I was the guy who brought his guitar to a campfire and I was opening for the main storyteller. My job was just to get the vibes right for the main act.”

Sunday’s event came on the heels of Trump’s recent request that courts overturn his 34-count felony conviction, including the hush money case.  

As one might imagine, Trump was at the center of many of Daniels’ stories on Sunday night, though she was loath to say his name, instead referring to him as “Voldemort” or “Tiny.”

Stormy told how Trump fixers have harassed her over the years, even bringing her daughter into it at times. She spoke about someone shooting her horse with rubber bullets and how she has had to wear a bulletproof vest in her own front yard. 

The show is made up mostly of stories Daniels has shared in past interviews, and far be it from us to vouch for the legitimacy of each one, but as she put it during her show, “Don’t believe me? Go look up the court documents.”

It’s clear that Daniels pays attention to the way she’s portrayed in the press, which has been atrocious at times. There’s a specific misrepresentation of her past that she especially takes exception to: the joke that goes, “Stormy is the only qualified person Trump ever hired for the job.” 

During her show, she noted that she was never hired to have sex with Trump, only to deny doing so. 

Court records show that Daniels met Trump at a celebrity golf tournament and was invited to what was framed as a dinner meeting. Upon meeting him at his room before dinner, she said she went to the restroom and when she exited he was in his underwear on the bed. 

In her testimony and onstage, she claimed she said “I think we should go” and moved toward the door but Trump allegedly stood in her way, saying, “This is the only way you’re getting out of the trailer park,” in reference to an earlier conversation they had about her upbringing. 

She pointed out that it was Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, who essentially leaked the nondisclosure agreement by pitching his book to multiple publishers, in which he admitted to paying Stormy $130,000 ahead of the 2016 election to buy her silence. Without Cohen’s actions, it’s not likely anyone would have known of the interaction to this day. 

Sunday’s show wasn’t all about Trump; Daniels also touched briefly on her career in the adult entertainment industry, where she met her current husband, also a former adult film star named Barrett Blades, who was on hand on Sunday night. 

Blades even brought Daniels onto the stage as an MC on Sunday, with the two parrying playfully back and forth during the set. The whole night was a loose performance, with an early admittance from Daniels that, “I’m not a stand-up comic and I’m terrified of public speaking.” 

I got a sense that Daniels was there not as a cash grab but for her own personal vindication — not just to clear her name of the falsehoods perpetuated by the media but to combat the unfair treatment she’s seen on social media. 

She alleged that she has effectively been shadow-banned on X thanks to owner Elon Musk’s close relationship with the president. When her whole career has been built off the idea of selling a version of herself, you can see how such treatment could threaten her livelihood.

She even claimed to have issues with PayPal, leading her to build her own platform to accept payments after multiple credit card companies reportedly refused to work with her. Sex workers have long been targets of discrimination by banks and credit card companies, so this comes as no surprise. 

Things also got emotional as Daniels spoke about her relationship with her 14-year-old daughter, whose school does not know that Daniels is her mother out of concerns for her daughter’s wellbeing. 

She said her daughter is aware of what she used to do for a living, a fact that Daniels never tried to hide from her. She said she was disgusted upon hearing how a classmate told her daughter “Your body, my choice” after Trump’s second election.   

Stormy reminded the crowd that her case against Trump was never politically motivated for her, she just wanted the truth to be known. She discussed how Fox News and CNN both twisted her words to paint her as a “gold digger,” to which she joked, “If I was a gold digger I’d have asked for a lot more money.” 

That’s a line she’s used many times in the past, but on Sunday she also broke out a new version: “If it was about money I wouldn’t be married to a bass player.” 

It’s worth noting that Daniels flirted with the idea of a Senate run in her home state of Louisiana as a Republican in 2010, calling it off when she found that she’d have to spend far too much money only for the media to refuse to take her seriously. 

Daniels didn’t discuss her personal political beliefs on Sunday but has said in the past that she espouses “libertarian values regarding both money and sex. She claims she hasn’t changed her Republican affiliation “because it makes [Republicans] so mad, and I am that kind of petty.” 

At Duckworth’s on Sunday, Daniels emphasized that she doesn’t see herself as a standup comic (a fact that comedians have been eager to remind her of, apparently) but has seen support from some members of the industry since embarking on her journey in touring.

Comedian Steve Hofstetter, who moved to Charlotte earlier this year, helped Daniels get started out while comic actor Tim Meadows, an alumni of Saturday Night Live, offered his advice over the phone after her 2018 cold-open cameo on the show.

Daniels did come with some more traditional couples material on Sunday night, speaking on her husband’s addiction to online shopping with a good bit about a strange toilet purchase that called for a ridiculously long extension cord to run across their house. 

She recalled a story about how her husband MacGyvered a horse bridle into a sex toy contraption that was then confused for a misplaced Roku remote, nearly leading to her untimely and embarrassing demise.

Read more: The Comedy Club at Duckworth’s Fills a Gap in the Local Scene

“The blending of comedy and storytelling went over very well,” said James Gaghan, talent buyer at Duckworth’s, after the show, adding that booking Daniels was part of a strategy to bring more well-known acts performing a wider range of shows to the new venue. 

The remainder of 2025 will see heavy hitters like Steph Tolev, Bobcat Goldthwait, Maddy Smith and Emil Wakim all perform at the 80-seat venue. James also hinted at bringing back favorites like Matthew Broussard, Natalie Cuomo and Jason Ellis in 2026. 

If the permitting process goes as planned, Gaghan expects to start major remodeling of the space by late summer 2026, leading to more seating and an overall upgrade.

“I think we are seeing the transition from being a curiosity from when we first opened in January to gaining trust as a reliable source of quality entertainment,” Gaghan said. “We are seeing guests return regularly for shows, which speaks to the overall quality of both service and shows we are providing.”