After a federal judge threw out Stormy Daniels’ defamation lawsuit against Donald Trump last month, ordering the AVN Hall of Famer to cover Trump’s legal costs in defending the claim, Trump seized on the judge’s decision, as AVN.com reported, slapping Daniels with a bill for a whopping $342,000.
In court documents filed on Tuesday, Daniels and her lawyer Michael Avenatti slammed Trump’s claim that he racked up more than $300,000 in lawyer’s fees as “exaggerated,” and called Trump’s claim that he paid lawyers for working nearly 510 hours—the equivalent of more than 63 eight-hour working days—on the defamation case “astonishing and wasteful,” according to a report by the political news site The Blast.
The defamation suit stemmed from a single Twitter posting by Trump back in April, in which he termed Daniels claim that she was physically threatened by a man invoking Trump’s name “a con job.”
But Trump claimed to have hired six lawyers to defend him in the case, two of them charging $750 per hour, and four others billing at a $550 per hour rate.
“These rates are not reasonable under the circumstances,” Daniels and Avenatti responded in their court filing, accusing Trump’s lawyers of an “inflated approach to billing.” Specifically, the Daniels court documents asks why Trump needed his lawyers to put in 70 hours writing a single, five-page document, and another stunning 143 hours penning a “routine” motion to move the case from New York to Los Angeles.
Avenatti said in the filing that he was able to prepare his own court filings in “far less time” that Trump’s attorneys claim to have spent on their legal duties. Trump’s lawyers claimed that the intense media attention paid to Daniels and Avenatti caused them to spend extra time on the case, but in their reply, Daniels and Avenatti scoffed at that claim as well.
“Trump’s attorneys point to nothing suggesting they had to spend additional time making any media appearances or speaking with members of the media, or that they had to spend more time on their briefs because of the media attention the case garnered,” they said in the court brief. “That the litigation captured some public interest does not render the defamation claim itself more complex or exceptional.”
Daniels said in the court filing that she is willing to pay no more than $25,000 to reimburse Trump’s legal fees.
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