CHATSWORTH, Calif.—Michael Avenatti, the lawyer representing Stormy Daniels in her lawsuit against Donald Trump—and who has appeared on a major network TV show almost every day since he and Daniels filed the lawsuit on March 6—returned to the ABC Network program The View for the second time in less than two weeks on Friday, where he offered new details of events leading up to the alleged threat against Daniels in a Las Vegas parking lot in 2011.
Appearing on the CBS program 60 Minutes on March 25, as well as on The View last week, Daniels has now twice publicly described an incident in 2011, when she was first considering going public to reveal her sexual encounter with Trump five years earlier, in which she was approached by a man who warned her to “leave Trump alone.”
Daniels’ then-infant daughter was in her car, and according to Daniels the man told her, “That's a beautiful little girl. It'd be a shame if something happened to her mom.”
Daniels gave an interview to InTouch Weekly that year, describing her alleged sexual encounter with Trump at a Lake Tahoe, Nevada, golf tournament where she and other porn performers were making a promotional appearance.
In her appearance on The View last week, Daniels said that one reason she did not report the threat to the police was that she did not want her husband to know about her sexual encounter with Trump. View panel member Paula Faris on Friday grilled Avenatti on why, if she didn’t want her husband to know, she gave her interview to InTouch—a seeming inconsistency in Daniels’ story.
“That’s not exactly what happened,” Avenatti told Faris. “What happened was, her ex-husband went and sold the story to InTouch, and InTouch came to her and said, ‘Look, we’re going to run the story with or without you. So you can either cooperate or not cooperate, but either way we’re running the story.'”
Daniels, at that point, chose to cooperate and gave her interview to InTouch. But when the magazine contacted the Trump Organization for a comment, “they were threatened by the Trump Organization and by Michael Cohen,” Avenatti said.
Cohen is Trump’s personal lawyer and “fixer” who made the $130,000 “hush money” payoff to Daniels just days before the 2016 presidential election. Cohen is now under federal criminal investigation, possibly in connection, at least in part, with the Daniels payoff.
In response to the threats from the Trump Organization and from Cohen, the weekly magazine killed the Daniels story, Avenatti told Faris.
“But before they killed the story, that’s when this assault happened, that’s when this assailant came up to her with her young daughter in the back of the car. That’s the timeline,” Avenatti said. “She had not had a chance to tell her current husband, because she did not know if they were going to actually run the story.”
In last week’s View appearance, Avenatti and Daniels released a new forensic sketch of the man Daniels says approached her and made the threat. That sketch may be viewed at this link.
Photo via ABC-TV The View Screen Capture
