President Trump wants more than $300,000 in legal fees from porn star Stormy Daniels, after a federal judge dismissed her defamation lawsuit against the president and determined he was entitled to attorney fees.
In a court filing on Monday, Trump’s attorneys said they are seeking $341,559.50 in attorney’s fees from Daniels, who has been involved in a legal battle with Trump since the beginning of this year due to an alleged extramarital affair. She filed a separate defamation lawsuit against Trump in the spring for suggesting she lied.
The filing claims that Daniels “filed this action, not because it had any merit, but instead for the ulterior purposes of raising her media profile, engaging in political attacks against the president by herself and her attorney, who has appeared on more than 150 national television news interviews attacking the President and now is exploring a run for the presidency himself in 2020.”
"This is a number created out of whole cloth," Avenatti said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. "And it is nothing compared to what he will owe my client from the main NDA case."
Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge James Otero dismissed Daniels’ defamation lawsuit against Trump, which cited a tweet from April where he called a forensic sketch of a man who allegedly threatened Daniels a “total con job.”
“The court agrees with Mr. Trump’s argument because the tweet in question constitutes ‘rhetorical hyperbole’ normally associated with politics and public discourse in the U.S.,” Otero said earlier this month, noting that the First Amendment protected such language.
Daniels was paid $130,000 by Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen in 2016 so she wouldn’t speak of the alleged affair with Trump. However, Daniels filed a lawsuit claiming the nondisclosure agreement should be nullified because it lacked Trump’s signature.
Trump has denied he was involved in an affair with Daniels.
No comments:
Post a Comment