Tuesday morning on The View, Stormy Daniels and her lawyer Michael Avenatti discussed her case against President Donald Trump and his lawyer Michael Cohen regarding the hush agreement she made over an affair she claims she had with Trump.
Over the course of the legal battle, Daniels said that in 2011, around the time she had given an interview to InTouch Magazine about the alleged affair, an unknown man threatened her to leave Trump alone. Recently, Daniels had a police sketch artist make a drawing of the man based on her description, which was shown on The View.
Avenatti said that the sketch was created by Lois Gibson, who holds the world record for the most successful forensic artist. When asked about how accurate or valuable a 7-year-old memory could be, Avenatti said that Gibson had worked on cases with even greater time differences.
Gibson, who first began working as a full-time forensic artist with the Houston Police Department in 1989, said in a 2004 interview that she has a 30 percent success rate with catching suspects, which was the standard success rate.
So if the world record holder only gets 3 out of 10 suspects, how accurate are these sketches?
A 2015 Vox report explored how besides people’s memories being an issue, people in general aren’t great at describing facial features. The report shows how despite the ability to catch some suspects from sketches, it can also result in the wrong person being convicted.
Despite this, Daniels believes the sketch to be accurate and insists that she still remembers what the man looks like, in part because of how good looking he was.
“That’s why he stood out to me, because I thought honestly that he was sort of handsome,” Daniels said.
Avenatti also said he believes he knows who sent the man to issue the threat, but has yet to confirm this. He said anyone who has information on the man can contact him at [email protected], and that if someone positively identifies the man, they’ll get $100,000 as a reward.
[Image via ABC screengrab]
