BY THE TIME I knock on the door of Stormy Daniels’s room at the Roger Smith Hotel, a drab brown-brick tower in east midtown, she’s been holed up in New York for 24 hours, waiting to talk to prosecutors in the criminal investigation into President Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen. Lately, if Daniels takes more than a couple days off from her highly publicized nationwide strip-club tour, people assume she is at her home outside Dallas. “I’d bet by tomorrow afternoon there will be people at my house,” Daniels tells me as she settles down in the center of an oversize gray sofa. I sit across from her, on a faded upholstered armchair. Between us are a tawny Oriental rug and a table set with a pot of coffee and a spread of pastries in a striped Financier Patisserie box. The people she means—paparazzi and men in red trucker hats who want her to stop talking about her alleged affair with the president—began circling last spring when Daniels decided to take on Trump. In doing so she became globally known by a single name: Stormy, the unlikely, embattled symbol of our tempestuous times.

It is just after 10:00 a.m. on a Tuesday, still early morning in the world of adult-film stars and their entourages. Daniels is barefoot, in black skinny jeans with silver zippers at the ankles and a purple V-neck T-shirt. With no makeup Daniels, 39, looks much younger than when she appeared on 60 Minutes last March and told 22 million viewers about her dalliance with Trump, about the hush money and the threat to her daughter and the nondisclosure agreement that she says Cohen forced her to sign weeks before the 2016 presidential election. In person, she is nothing like that stoic, on-message woman. She is blunt, foulmouthed, funny. I ask her for more details on her alleged 2006 affair with Trump. “How many details can you really give about two minutes?” she says. Two minutes? I ask. “Maybe. I’m being generous.”

Calling room 811 a suite would be an overstatement, but there is a living room with a desk where Daniels’s lawyer, Michael Avenatti, who has parlayed her lawsuit against Trump and Cohen into cable-news ubiquity and a potential 2020 presidential run, works the phones. Late the night before, he changed locations, from the chic Park Hyatt, where he has practically lived since taking on Daniels’s case last spring (and where the media had begun to gather, knowing Daniels was in town), to the less conspicuous and infinitely less chic Roger Smith, with its shabby, red-carpeted lobby and dim recessed lighting. Avenatti is hardly paying attention to us, focused as he is on his latest clash with the White House, this time over the family-separation policy at the Southern border. During the nearly two hours that Daniels and I talk, Avenatti becomes a sort of white-noise outrage machine in the background. (“Juan Carlos, we need to find a way to make this happen!” and “This is why people trust me!”)

Avenatti, with his refrigerator-shaped jaw and overcaffeinated demeanor, can come off as Daniels’s macho protector. But up close their relationship is warmer and more equitable. For all his cable-TV cockiness, Avenatti seems to admit that Daniels could outsmart him. (“She’s really fucking smart,” he will tell me at least three times.) Daniels clearly trusts and relies on Avenatti, but she also treats him like a lovable, well-meaning stepbrother who forgot to take his Ritalin.