A federal judge on Tuesday ordered AVN Hall of Famer Stormy Daniels to repay Donald Trump nearly $300,000 in attorney fees, after the same judge—S. James Otero—dismissed Daniels’ defamation lawsuit against Trump in October, according to an Associated Press report. Daniels brought the lawsuit in April, after Trump took to Twitter to claim that her story of being physically threatened by a man invoking Trump’s name was “a total con job.”
Daniels has since claimed, in a statement on November 28, that she never wished to file the defamation lawsuit against Trump, and that her lawyer Michael Avenatti filed the suit despite her objections. Daniels in March filed a lawsuit against Trump and Trump’s then-lawyer Michael Cohen over the $130,000 “hush money” deal that she signed, to keep her from discussing a sexual encounter with Trump she had in 2006.
Last week, Trump’s lawyers asked Otero to hit Daniels with a total penalty of nearly $800,000, as AVN.com reported, a sum which included what lawyer Charles Harder claimed were $390,000 charged by his firm to Trump for work on the defamation case, plus another $390,000 as a penalty to Daniels for bringing the suit in the first place.
In awarding the total of $293,052.33, Otero ruled that only $1,000 in penalties against Daniels was required, because Daniels was "already deterred" against filing further defamation suits against Trump, refraining from doing so despite Trump's "continuing use of rhethorical hyperbole" against her. The added $1,000 in penalties brought the total that Daniels must pay to just over $294,000.
Responding to Otero’s order Tuesday afternoon, Avenatti claimed that in the “hush money” lawsuit, Daniels will be awarded $1.5 million, negating the $293,000 that Otero ordered her to pay Trump for his attorneys’ fees.
“Stormy will never have to pay the felon Cohen or Trump a single dime in attorney's fees, costs or sanctions. The award is dwarfed by the $1.5 million award to be issued in NDA case—the main case where Cohen and Trump have been lying to the court and the public,” Avenatti wrote on his Twitter account.
“Trump and his attorney's attempt to fool the public about the importance of the attorneys' fees in the defamation case, which are a fraction of what they owe my client in the main NDA case, is an absolute joke,” Avenatti also wrote on Twitter. “People are smarter than that.”
But the 66-year-old Otero, a former Los Angeles County Superior Court judge who was appointed to the federal bench by Republican President George W. Bush, will also rule on the hush money case, according to Reuters. That case remains pending.
Otero in October ruled that Trump’s “con job” tweet was “hyperbole that would be protected,” and that to penalize such “hyperbole” would have a “chilling effect” on political speech by candidates running for office. Daniels and Avenatti had argued that Trump’s claim of a “con job” was false, but they have not yet produced evidence—such as an identification of the man who made the alleged threat against Daniels—that would definitively show that the threat actually took place.
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