Donald Trump’s lawyers sought to undermine Stormy Daniels’ credibility on Thursday, pressing on her motivations for agreeing to a hush-money payment as the adult film star continued critical testimony in the former president’s criminal trial.

Susan Necheles, a lawyer for Trump, asked Daniels to explain on Thursday why she didn’t just go public with her story in the waning days of the 2016 campaign and instead sought to get paid for her story. She noted that Daniels had been talking to a journalist at the publication Slate who had been trying to convince her to let him publish her story, but that she wouldn’t have been paid. She also suggested Daniels wanted to hurt Trump because Trump opposed gay marriage and abortion.

In rapid-fire questions, Necheles seemed to be trying to seed the idea that Daniels, dressed in a green blouse and black sweater, was more interested in getting a payout than telling the truth.

“You wanted money, right?” Necheles said.

Daniels, who insisted she wanted to do a press conference in the waning days of the 2016 campaign, said “I wanted the truth to come out,” adding that she wanted a paper trail. “I never asked for money from anyone in particular, I asked for money to tell my story.”

Necheles laid out all the ways Daniels had profited from her story – including a book deal, documentary and merchandise celebrating Trump’s indictment.

“A large part of your livelihood for a number of years now has been making money of the story that you had sex with President Trump and you helped him get indicted,” Necheles said.

Daniels insisted she wasn’t profiting but simply “doing her job” to fund significant legal bills.

Necheles went on to try to poke holes in Daniels’s story about her encounter, highlighting instances in which she said Daniels’s recollection had changed over the years.

For example, Daniels testified on Tuesday that she never ate dinner with Trump during their encounter in his Lake Tahoe hotel room, but during a 2011 interview with InTouch magazine, she said: “We ended up having dinner in the room. I cannot remember what we ordered.” She also said that it was Keith Schiller, Trump’s bodyguard, who had invited her to have dinner with Trump, but in the 2011 interview she suggested it was Trump himself. She had also given slightly different descriptions in the past of how Trump greeted her when she entered his hotel suite.

Daniels, who spoke quickly and appeared unfazed by Necheles’s questions, refused to concede any inconsistencies. “You’re trying to make it say that it changed but it hasn’t changed,” she said.

Necheles also suggested that Daniels could make up a good story about having sex with Trump because of her experience in the adult entertainment industry. “You have a lot of experience in making phony stories about sex appear to be real.”

“If that story was untrue I would have written it to be a lot better,” Daniels fired back. Necheles also forced Daniels to concede she had no direct knowledge of Trump’s involvement in the $130,000 hush-money payment, but later acknowledged she became aware of it when Trump’s lawyers conceded it in a court proceeding against her.

In one striking exchange, Necheles sought to question Daniels testimony from earlier in the week in which she said she was scared and startled when she emerged from the bathroom in Trump’s suite and found him in bed in his T-shirt and underwear. Necheles noted that Daniels had acted in hundreds of porn movies, and “according to you seeing a man sitting on a bed in T-shirt and boxer shorts was so upsetting?”

Daniels replied that it was startling to see a much older man who she didn’t know well to be in such a revealing state.

During redirect examination, prosecutor Susan Hoffinger asked Daniels bluntly if she was telling the truth or lies about Trump. “The truth.” Seeking to undercut testimony that Daniels had come out ahead because of the story, Hoffinger also asked Daniels whether the whole episode had been a net positive or net negative on her life.

“Negative,” Daniels said.

After Daniels’s testimony concluded, Trump lawyer Todd Blanche said he would ask again for a mistrial. Merchan, who denied a mistrial request yesterday, said he would hear the request at the end of testimony today

Trump arrived in court on Thursday with the Florida senator Rick Scott among his entourage, part of a parade of supporters who have come to court to back the former president. Scott left the courtroom shortly before 11am and had not returned by the time the court took a break about 20 minutes later.

The relationship between Trump and Daniels is central to origins of the case because Trump’s then lawyer and personal fixer, Michael Cohen, paid her $130,000 to keep quiet about their alleged sexual encounter during the 2016 election campaign.

Prosecutors argue that the money paid to Daniels was therefore an election expense and was deliberately entered wrongly in Trump’s business documents – with that act being the crime, rather than anything to do with the actual payment of hush money to cover up the alleged affair.

However, during the last court session on Tuesday, Daniels went into detailed descriptions of her sexual relationship with Trump, prompting a rebuke from Judge Juan Merchan and Trump’s lawyers to again bid – unsuccessfully – for a mistrial.

Daniels testified that she pocketed about $96,000 of the $130,000 payment, after her agent and lawyer took cuts. The news of the pay-off only emerged in the US media in 2018.

Trump is charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in connection with the payments and had pleaded not guilty.

The hush-money case is the first of four criminal cases to reach a jury against Trump but the other three have hit serious delays, which could perhaps prevent them from starting before November’s presidential election.

They involve Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election result in Georgia, his keeping of sensitive documents at his Florida resort and his conduct during the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.

Trump’s criminal hush-money trial: what to know

However, those legal travails have had little impact so far on Trump’s popularity with his Republican base. He has swept aside opposition within the party and is all but certain to be the Republican nominee to go up against Joe Biden in the race for the White House.

In most recent national polling Trump has a narrow lead against Biden in the presidential contest and is also performing well in the vital swing states that will decide the race.