WASHINGTON, DC — Stormy Daniels, the porn star who received $130,000 from Donald Trump's lawyer just before Election Day, is ready to come forward with her version of events of an alleged sexual encounter with Trump. Her manager, Gina Rodriguez, said Daniels believes Michael Cohen, Trump's personal lawyer, invalidated a non-disclosure agreement by telling news outlets that Cohen did, in fact, pay Daniels with his own money and that Cohen has been pitching a book proposal that would talk about Daniels' story.

"Everything is off now, and Stormy is going to tell her story," Rodriguez said. What actually happened between Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, and Trump inside a Lake Tahoe, Nevada, hotel room 12 years ago remains murky. Clifford, who was promoting a porn production company during a celebrity golf tournament, in the years since, has said she and Trump had sex once and carried on a subsequent yearslong platonic relationship. But she has also, through a lawyer, denied the two had an affair. Trump's lawyer, Cohen, has denied there was ever an affair.

The actress first detailed her account of an alleged extramarital affair with Trump in 2011, when the celebrity website The Dirty published it but then removed the material under the threat of a lawsuit, according to the site's founder, Nik Richie. Her story then remained largely out of public view until a month before the 2016 presidential election, when the website The Smoking Gun published an account that went mostly unnoted by major news organizations.

In January, The Wall Street Journal reported that a limited liability company in Delaware formed by Cohen made the six-figure payment to the actress to keep her from discussing the affair during the presidential campaign. Cohen said the payment was made with his own money, and that "neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms. Clifford, and neither reimbursed me for the payment, either directly or indirectly."

He was responding to inquiries from the Federal Election Commission, which is investigating an advocacy group's complaint that the October 2016 transaction violated campaign finance laws.

The payment was not reported as an expenditure nor an in-kind contribution, and the origin of the money is still unclear, said Paul Ryan, a vice president at Common Cause, the group that filed the complaint.

Bradley Smith, the Republican chairman the Federal Election Commission from 2000 to 2005, was skeptical that the payment by Cohen could pose a campaign finance issue. "You'd have to prove that it was a coordinated expenditure, and that the reason it was done was for the benefit of the campaign," he said. If the payment was made to protect Trump's brand or avoid personal embarrassment, he said, that would likely not be a campaign problem.