“Court is not normally like this—this is a TV trial,” one veteran court reporter said to me Thursday morning, during a 15-minute break in cross-examination. It was my first day in court for the Trump hush money trial, and it seemed everyone in the media had really shown up. Of course they had—today was the day that the defense would decide what to do with Stormy Daniels.

I was here because my colleague, Jeremy Stahl, who has been covering the trial, suggested it might be a good day for me to come. I’ve spent a lot of my time at Slate writing about women, gender, what men do to women, and how complicated it all can be.

Stormy Daniels’ story has been fascinating to me for the same reasons it’s been fascinating to everyone. She’s a self-assured porn actor who admitted to an “affair” with the president while simultaneously expressing disgust with him. For a while, back in 2018, she was a main character for the resistance movement, as she embarked on a “Make America Horny Again” strip club tour across the U.S. More recently, she has been the subject of a devastating documentary that paints her tale in a darker light, documenting the awfulness of both her experience with attorney Michael Avenatti, who is in prison for stealing from his clients (including Daniels), and her relationship with Trump and its aftermath. Take the “Make America Horny Again” tour name—she despised it, she said emphatically multiple times on the stand.

How would the defense treat this witness? Remember, this isn’t a case about sexual assault. This isn’t even really a case about whether or not Stormy Daniels and Donald Trump had sex—it’s a case about campaign finance misfiling, elevated to election fraud. And yet, the Trump defense team, led by Susan Necheles, a petite woman in a dusty-rose suit, interrogated Stormy Daniels as if this were a class on how the law has historically treated women speaking up about sexual assault. She attacked her for “misremembering” details that were so minor as to be absurd, accused Daniels of consistently changing her story, and tried to drag Daniels as both a slut and a money-grubber. It was almost impressive how she managed to be so pedantic and also bullying at the same time.

Daniels was much calmer and much more composed Thursday than she was on Tuesday, according to those who were there. Maybe part of that had to do with the fact that she had already gotten through the hard part of telling her story, sex and all, point by point, at least once. Necheles’ line of questioning was also astonishingly simplistic and, frankly, petty. There were a few minor details that Necheles kept pressing Daniels on, suggesting that she had changed those and therefore maybe her whole account was moot: who actually asked her to dinner and took her number, Trump himself or his bodyguard; whether or not they actually ate dinner; and whether Daniels arrived to the hotel by car or on foot.

These discrepancies are so unbelievably minor that it was difficult to really understand what Necheles was even going for with this—whether Daniels remembered if she walked to the hotel or took a car there doesn’t seem like the kind of detail that would be seared in one’s memory, even around a weird sexual encounter. More to the point, the examples of these discrepancies seemed to stem largely from other people’s write-ups of the story, not Daniels’ own. “I don’t control what parts they put in magazines,” she said at one point, making the line of questioning seem both weak on the merits and a bit absurd.

More important is the question of whether the sex was something less than consensual. It is a bit absurd to me that Trump’s defense team would even want to veer into the territory of asking anything along the lines of “But actually ma’am, did our client rape you?”—and yet, that was the road Necheles ended up going down, again trying to catch Daniels in a lie.

The thing is, there actually is a discrepancy in how Daniels has reported the consensual nature of the encounter over time. When she first started telling her story to the media, which happened most officially in both 2016 (though it wasn’t published then) and 2018 (when it eventually was), Daniels was adamant about the fact that this wasn’t a story of rape. One of the people she told this story to both times was my former Slate colleague Jacob Weisberg, who wrote about it in 2018. “She didn’t allege any kind of abuse, insisting she was not a victim,” Weisberg wrote. “The worst Trump had done, she said, was break promises she’d never believed he would fulfill.”

Remember, the winter of 2018 directly followed the fall of 2017, when the Harvey Weinstein story broke open #MeToo. Daniels wanted to be clear that her story wasn’t one of those kinds of stories. As is her way, she seemed to make light of the situation, making fun of Trump for his obsession with sharks, expertly denigrating his sexual prowess, making clear that she did this not really because she liked him much, but because he could be useful to her.

The story that she’s told—most clearly in her documentary, but also here in this courtroom—is a little bit different. She never said no, but she was definitely not expecting the situation to turn sexual. She was shocked when she walked out of the bathroom to see him in his underwear. She felt lightheaded, and they ended up on the bed, and exactly how it happened was unclear.

Does this make Stormy Daniels a noncredible witness? That her story went from a slightly humorous and self-deprecating tale about an affair into something that she would never have initiated herself, and probably didn’t want to happen at all? When Necheles asked Daniels, “Did Trump do something that made you feel like you had to have sex with him?” her answer was a slightly heartbreaking “My own insecurities made me feel this way.” In Daniels’ effort to dissociate her story from #MeToo, she seems to have missed that #MeToo aimed to unpack all of the different ways sexual encounters can end up being less consensual than they should be—and yet, her story still perfectly illustrates those exact specifics.

Toward the end of her questioning, Necheles brought out the big guns, the line of questioning that everyone had been wondering if she would use. “You’ve acted in 200-ish movies, right?” Daniels corrected the number slightly downward, to 150. “But according to you, seeing a man sitting on a bed in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, you got lightheaded?” Necheles prodded.

The obvious implication here was that Stormy Daniels, a porn star, should essentially be a vending machine for whoever wants to have sex with her. Daniels was horrified at the implication, almost sputtering the obvious answer: that “when you’re not expecting it, it’s a different reaction.”

It was the second time Necheles had tried to throw Daniels’ porn career in her face. Earlier, she had suggested that Daniels’ experience writing porn movies had provided her with the experience she needed to make up her story about Trump entirely. “So you have a lot of experience in making phony stories about sex appear to be real?” Necheles had asked, in a moment that seemed to provoke a collective inhale throughout the courtroom.

Daniels’ response was both a rebuttal and a burn: “If the story wasn’t true, I would have written it to be a lot better.”