A California judge has ordered Donald Trump to pay adult film actor and director Stormy Daniels $ 44,100 to cover legal fees in the fight over her non-disclosure agreement (NDA) with the president.
Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, says she had an affair with Trump from 2006 to 2007. Trump denies it.
Daniels sued in 2018, seeking 11 days before the 2016 election to be released from an NDA she signed with Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. The lawsuit was dismissed because the agreement was considered irresponsible.
Trump’s lawyers said Daniels did not win the case and therefore was not entitled to legal fees. But Judge Robert Broadbelt III disagreed in his ruling on Monday, which ruled that Daniels was the “dominant party” under California law. The verdict was posted online by Daniels’ lawyers.
The White House did not immediately comment.
Cohen paid Daniels $ 130,000. After the Trump election, she pleaded not guilty. Trump and his supporters denied that the president knew about the payment, before Trump acknowledged it in May 2018 and said Cohen was compensated.
In court, Trump’s lawyers also claimed that Daniels did not prove that the president was part of the NDA, which was created under the name “David Dennison”. Judge Broadbelt wrote that there was a great deal of evidence to show that Cohen chose Dennison as a pseudonym for Trump.
After her lawyer announced the decision, Daniels wrote on Twitter: “Yup. Another win. ”
But she has not won every battle with her alleged former paramour. Daniels also prosecuted Trump for libel, after he said on Twitter that a man she said threatened to remain silent in 2011 was “non-existent”. Trump also posted side-by-side photos of the composite sketch of the man and Daniels’ husband.
That process was escaped. Daniels appealed the decision and an order to pay Trump nearly $ 300,000 in attorneys’ fees.
The judge ruled in that case that Trump’s statements on Twitter were protected speech under the First Amendment.
Since Trump’s election, Daniels has remained in the adult industry, using her fame to promote strip club appearances and shows, including her latest television venture: a “Spooky Babes Paranormal Show” in which she, she says, is a team of researchers lead to hunt ghosts.
Cohen pleaded guilty to charges of embezzlement and lying to Congress, including crimes, and was sentenced in 2018 to three years in prison.
Authorities in New York are reviewing Trump’s tax records and other financial information, in an investigation into the Daniels payment and others.
In a bizarre discussion on Thursday, during a campaign campaign in Pennsylvania, the president seems to confirm one famous aspect of Daniels’ story about their alleged relationship: that he’s afraid of sharks.
“They said the other night, the shark,” Trump said. ‘They said,’ Sharks, we need to protect them. “I said, ‘Wait a minute, wait.’ They actually want to remove all seals to save the shark. I said, ‘Wait, didn’t you do it the other way around?’ ”
“It’s true. I’m not a big fan of sharks either. I do not know how many votes I will lose?”
Daniels first said that Trump was “afraid of sharks” in the 2011 interview.
“He was, ‘I donate to all this charity and I would never donate to one charity that helps sharks,'” she said. “I hope all sharks die.”
She also covered the topic in Full Disclosure, her 2018 autobiography. the Democratic presidential nomination, nearly a decade before Trump beat her for the White House.
“He had a great conversation about the race, and called ‘our plan’ several times,” Daniels writes. But “even when he was on the phone with Hillary, his attention kept going back to the sharks.”
