LOS ANGELES—AVN Hall of Famer Stormy Daniels anticipated a ruling Tuesday that she would have to pay legal fees to Donald Trump stemming from the defamation lawsuit she filed against the former president in 2018, she told AVN Thursday.
"The fee award by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals resulted from the Appeal of an adverse decision in the federal Court in the defamation case my previous, now incarcerated lawyer, Mr. [Michael] Avenatti filed," Daniels said in statement to AVN this morning. "The filing of that suit was against my wishes. Under the law in those cases the Court is compelled to award fees and the ruling was expected."
The Ninth Circuit Court issued its decision—awarding Trump $121,972 in attorney's fees—practically at the same time Tuesday that he was being arraigned in New York Supreme Court on 34 felony charges partially related to alleged "hush money" payments he made to Daniels prior to the 2016 presidential election in order to cover up extramarital relations he had with her years earlier. Trump pleaded not guilty to all counts in the indictment, but it made him the first former U.S. president to face criminal charges.
While Daniels' defamation case against Trump was connected to events surrounding her association with him, it was not linked legally to the charges for which he must now stand trial. First filed in April 2018 in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York, the defamation suit came in response to a tweet Trump posted calling a forensic sketch of a man Daniels said had threatened her a “con job” and a depiction of “a non-existent man.” Daniels had presented the sketch during an April 17, 2018 appearance on ABC talk program The View while discussing an incident she'd first detailed on CBS' 60 Minutes the month before. She claimed that the man in the drawing had approached her in a Las Vegas parking lot and admonished her to "forget the story" about her dalliance with Trump, then looked toward her infant daughter in the backseat of her car and commented, "That's a beautiful little girl. It'd be a shame if something happened to her mom."
Daniels' case was dismissed in October 2018 by federal judge S. James Otero, who subsequently saddled her with a bill of $294,000 for Trump's legal expenses. Daniels appealed Otero's dismissal of the case to the Ninth Circuit, where it was upheld in an August 2020 ruling.
As far back as November 2018, following that original ruling, Daniels claimed that Avenatti had filed the case against her wishes. She fired Avenatti in 2019 after discovering he had embezzled funds from her, and he ended up later getting convicted for that and other counts of fraud and extortion, and sentenced to two and half years in prison. Daniels hired attorney Clark Brewster to take over her legal matters, and he sought to overturn the attorney's fee ruling against her, arguing that it had been irregular because Otero had failed to file a written judgement in the decision. Brewster took that claim to the U.S. Supreme Court, but SCOTUS rebuffed it in February 2021, leaving the issue in the hands of the Ninth Circuit, which in March of last year once again ruled in Trump's favor, leaving his attorney's fee award in place.
Daniels then filed a motion with the Ninth Circuit to have the amount of the award reduced, but the court dismissed that request in its Tuesday ruling, which resulted in the new sum of nearly $122,000 in additional fees being tacked on to the amount she's been found to owe Trump.
An interview with Daniels discussing the current charges against Trump is scheduled to air on Fox Nation's Piers Morgan Uncensored this afternoon at 4 p.m. ET/1 p.m. PT.
Photo of Stormy Daniels and husband Barrett Blade on the 2023 AVN Awards Red Carpet by Jeff Koga/@KogaFoto
