The seeds of Donald J. Trump’s indictment by the Manhattan district attorney’s office were planted 17 years ago at a celebrity golf tournament in Nevada where he met Stormy Daniels in July 2006.

At the time, Trump was the 60-year-old star of The Apprentice, a reality show in which contestants competed in a test of their business acumen.

She was a 27-year-old pornographic film star and director. According to Daniels’s account, Trump invited her to his hotel room for dinner.

As they chatted, he told her he could make her a guest on his show, and the evening turned intimate. Trump denies that any of that occurred.

As Daniels tells it, Trump called her occasionally after that night, nicknaming her “Honeybunch”.

They saw each other at least twice more in 2007, but they did not sleep together again. And Trump never put her on The Apprentice. In 2011 and then in 2016, Daniels tried to sell the story to magazines.

In 2016, when it seemed the disclosure that he had cheated on his wife with a porn star three months after his son was born could derail any chance he had left to win the election, a $130,000 non-disclosure agreement was struck through Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen.