Porn star: Trump made Roethlisberger ‘promise to take care of me’
For the second straight week, Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger is in the headlines for all the wrong reasons.
Last week, his team was knocked out of the playoffs by the Jacksonville Jaguars, 45-42, in the divisional round of the NFL playoffs.
Today, news broke that Roethlisberger may have been loosely connected to an alleged affair between President Donald Trump and porn star Stephanie “Stormy Daniels” Clifford that supposedly occurred at a Lake Tahoe hotel July of 2006. Trump married Melania Trump, his third wife, in January of 2005.
In an exclusive interview with In Touch that took place in 2011, Clifford said she had a one-night affair with Trump, who, at the time, was a reality television personality. In the Fall of 2016, the Republican presidential candidate’s legal representatives reportedly paid her $130,000 to sign a nondisclosure agreement.
This story has been on-going for several days, but In Touch interview is the first time that Roethlisberger has been mentioned as a figure in the incident in question. According the Clifford, the day after the private rendezvous, she was socializing with the Steelers’ quarterback, when Trump asked him to walk her home.
Here is part of Clifford’s account from the 2011 In Touch interview:
“I ended up leaving and the next night I saw him again at a party. It was in the downstairs of the hotel I was in and he was hanging out with Ben Roethlisberger. When I got there, he was already with him. He had Keith, his bodyguard, call me and ask me if I was coming. When I got there, I called Keith and he told me where he was sitting and he brought me over. And he was hanging out with Ben for a long time. A couple other people around, nobody famous. Mostly people trying to hang on to them. Ben had just won the Super Bowl that year. Donald excused himself. He had to leave, I don't remember why, and he made Ben promise to take care of me. I stayed another 15-20 minutes and Ben Roethlisberger actually walked me up to my room that night because Donald told him to. Yeah, he walked me all the way to my hotel room.”
Roethlisberger was actually accused of rape in 2009 and 2010. The first of those alleged incidents occurred in Lake Tahoe in 2008 and was settled in 2012. The accusations for the second alleged incident, which supposedly occurred in Milledgeville, Ga. in 2010, was dismissed after Georgia prosecutors declined to press chargers.
This story was originally published January 19, 2018 at 4:55 PM with the headline "Porn star: Trump made Roethlisberger ‘promise to take care of me’."