(ASSOCIATED PRESS) Stormy Daniels took the witness stand Tuesday at Donald Trump's hush money trial, describing for jurors a sexual encounter the porn actor says she had with him in 2006 that resulted in her being paid off to keep silent during the presidential race 10 years later.

Jurors appeared riveted as Daniels offered a detailed and at times graphic account of the encounter Trump has denied. Trump stared straight ahead as Daniels entered the courtroom, later whispering to his lawyers and hanging his head away from the witness box as she testified.

The testimony was by far the most-awaited spectacle in a trial that has toggled between tabloidesque elements and dry record-keeping details. A courtroom appearance by a porn actor who says she had an intimate encounter with a former American president adds to the long line of historic firsts in a landmark case laden with tawdry claims of sex, payoffs and cover-ups and unfolding as the presumptive Republican nominee makes another bid for the White House.

Daniels veered into salacious details despite the repeated objections of defense lawyers, who after the lunch break demanded for the first time a mistrial over what they said were prejudicial and irrelevant comments.

“This is the kind of testimony that makes it impossible to come back from,” defense lawyer Todd Blanche said. “How can we come back from this in a way that’s fair to President Trump?”

The judge rejected the request and said defense lawyers should have raised more objections during the testimony.

Daniels' statements are central to the case because in the final weeks of Trump’s 2016 Republican presidential campaign, his then-lawyer and personal fixer, Michael Cohen, paid Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about what she says was an awkward and unexpected sexual encounter with Trump at a celebrity golf outing in Lake Tahoe in July 2006. Trump has pleaded not guilty.

Led by a prosecutor's questioning, Daniels described how an initial meeting at a golf tournament, where they discussed the adult film industry, progressed to a “brief” sexual encounter that she said Trump initiated after inviting her to dinner and back to his hotel suite.

She said she didn’t feel physically or verbally threatened, though she knew his bodyguard was outside the suite, and there was what she perceived as an imbalance of power: Trump “was bigger and blocking the way.” At the time, Trump was married to his wife, Melania, who has not been in court for the trial.

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