Stormy Daniels Peacock Documentary Review: Porn Star Deserved Better

A sympathetic portrait of a porn star whose life was turned upside down by the President of the United States, Sarah Gibson’s “Stormy” might not be confused for any of the other movies that its subject has starred in before, but it shares a few key things in common with virtually all of them: It’s poorly shot, severely lacking in character detail, and much longer than most people would ever need it to be. There’s self-evident value in Gibson’s efforts to spotlight the human consequences of tabloid scandal, and her film illustrates America’s culture of misogyny with the same conviction that it assails the financially punitive nature of our country’s legal system. And yet, the more this bland and incurious Peacock Original argues that Stormy has been done wrong by the media, the more convincingly it makes the case that she deserved a better documentary.

Assuming that you’ve been alive on Earth for the last six years and don’t exclusively watch Fox News, you probably know the basic facts of what happened between Stephanie “Stormy Daniels” Clifford and Donald J. Trump. But Gibson’s film, like all Peacock Originals, has been made for posterity, and so it painstakingly unpacks the hush money scandal that made Trump the first U.S. president to be indicted by a grand jury. 

To recap: They met at a celebrity golf tournament in 2006, when he was 60 and she was 27. Trump invited Daniels to dinner, her publicist encouraged her to go “for the…