A man who claimed without evidence that he had sex with former President Barack Obama says the media is showing a “sickening” double standard with coverage of an alleged affair between President Trump and porn star Stormy Daniels.
Larry Sinclair’s allegations involving Obama, cocaine, and a limo — set in 1999, when Obama was a state senator — failed to gain broad coverage for a variety of reasons, including lack of corroboration and Sinclair’s record of crimes involving deceit.
But Sinclair says the media is giving too much attention and too little skepticism to claims of a 2006 affair between Daniels and Trump.
“Stormy Daniels is being pimped and pimping the media now and it’s lining her pockets,” Sinclair told the Washington Examiner. “I believe she had sex with him. Do I believe she’s trying to twist and add to it to benefit her interests? You’re damn right I do.”
An interview with Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, is set to air Sunday on the CBS program “60 Minutes.” The performer staging a national strip club tour has given other recent interviews, including to “Inside Edition” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
Sinclair said he views Daniels’ coyness about details — as she sues to invalidate a $130,000 nondisclosure agreement — as well as her attempt to sidestep the deal, as reasons to doubt her truthfulness. He said he watched with suspicion as she declined to say if a signature was hers.
“I do believe that there are enough contradictions by Ms. Daniels to justify questioning her motive and truthfulness,” Sinclair said, citing “her statements or nonstatements in subsequent interviews implying that her signature was not her signature [and] her back-and-forth on whether Trump paid her.”
“I find this whole double standard sickening, and no I am not a bigger supporter of Trump, but I am a supporter of fair and unbiased media coverage,” he said. “I find the whole NDA and accepting money and then later coming back and using a completely legal incident for political and personal gain questionable.”
Michael Avenatti, an attorney for Daniels, declined to address Sinclair’s suggestion that the media be more skeptical of her claims.
“Is this a joke? Am I being punked?” Avenatti wrote in an email.
Sinclair — who runs a neighborhood revitalization nonprofit in Cocoa, Fla., where he’s considering a run for mayor — said he believes the media also gives too much credence to affair claims by ex-Playboy bunny Karen McDougal and women alleging misconduct by Trump.
There are many distinctions between the allegations made by Sinclair and those made by Clifford and McDougal. For example, Sinclair lacks a photo of himself with Obama, who was married to future first lady Michelle Obama at the time of the alleged two-day relationship.
Trump has denied cheating on first lady Melania Trump, but he did pose for photos with Daniels and McDougal.
Daniels passed a polygraph in 2011, her team said this week. Sinclair allegedly failed a polygraph in 2008, but he says the tests don’t mean much.
Daniels told her story to some journalists, including from Slate and In Touch magazine, before signing the October 2016 NDA, though neither published her account. She and McDougal do have a degree of corroboration from friends who attest to contemporaneous conversations or, in the case of McDougal, provided the media with a letter she allegedly wrote documenting the claims.
Sinclair’s allegations, by contrast, lack documentary evidence or corroboration from third parties. And whereas Trump has a decadeslong history of romantic relationships with women, Sinclair’s gender does not match Obama’s reported preference.
“It seems to me that there is a world of difference between the two stories and that there is no double standard,” said Joel Kaplan, associate dean for professional graduate studies at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.
“Sinclair is making a singular allegation without any support,” Kaplan said. “Ms. Daniels’ allegation is backed up by the fact that there was a settlement and a nondisclosure agreement, which certainly lends credibility to her allegations. If Mr. Sinclair was just one of 14 men making these allegations against President Obama that would be one thing and probably worthy of a story. In President Trump’s case, there are multiple women who came forward. So, no I see no double standard.”
The high point of Sinclair’s press exposure came when he rented a room at the National Press Club in June 2008, prompting an unsuccessful campaign to block the event by journalists fearful that the venue would lend credibility to his claims.
A dueling press conference was planned by Whitehouse.com, then a pornographic website whose owner Dan Parisi had paid Sinclair $20,000 to take the polygraph that Sinclair allegedly failed. Parisi later sued Sinclair unsuccessfully for libel for saying the results were doctored.
“It wasn’t until after the fact I was told the Whitehouse.com press conference didn’t take place,” Sinclair said, recalling that police arrested him at the press club and sent him to Delaware to face theft charges. He also had an open warrant for his arrest in Colorado for allegedly signing someone else’s tax return check.
Sinclair said the Delaware and Colorado cases were misunderstandings, but admits he was convicted in Arizona for forgery in 1981, then in Florida for using a friend’s credit card before getting a 16-year sentence in Colorado in the late ‘80s in a similar case. He was released in 1999, the same year he allegedly met Obama through a limo driver in Chicago.
In one similarity between Sinclair’s allegations and those made by Daniels and McDougal, significant amounts of money changed hands, resulting in legal action and claims of wrongful gagging of the accuser.
Sinclair negotiated a deal in which he ultimately was paid $20,000 by Parisi to consent to a polygraph. A copy of the check is an exhibit in the libel case Parisi brought against Sinclair. At one point, another $10,000 was supposed to be split between two charities.
Daniels is suing to get out of nondisclosure agreement prepared by Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who like the president says Daniels is lying about an affair, and McDougal is suing to get out of an NDA in which she was paid $150,000 for the rights to her story by the company that publishes the Trump-friendly National Enquirer, which didn’t print the claims.
Sinclair said his Whitehouse.com deal required that he give exclusive rights for polygraphing to the company for a period of four weeks during the 2008 campaign, a claim that appears to be consistent with an email cited in court documents, and he suggests Parisi may not have acted independently in the libel lawsuit, which was dismissed by a federal judge in 2012.
Sinclair said he lost money on his 2009 book Barack Obama & Larry Sinclair: Cocaine, Sex, Lies & Murder? in which he associates a Chicago-area killing with his affair claims.
“To journalists I would say take your time, compare statements and call out contradictions in statements and previous interviews,” Sinclair said. “When it comes to polygraphs be very sure you vet the examiners conducting them and always ask for the computer scoring results as well as the examiners findings.”
Parisi did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Obama’s office.
