More than one year ago, Stormy Daniels filed an appeal to a judge’s ruling that threw out her defamation lawsuit against Donald Trump. On Tuesday of this week, a three-judge panel in federal appellate court finally heard arguments in the case, as lawyers for Daniels and Trump went head-to-head in Pasadena, California.
In 2018, Daniels claimed in a televised interview that she had been physically threatened in a Las Vegas parking lot by a man who invoked Trump’s name in his attempt to frighten her. In the interview, Daniels presented a forensic sketch of the man she recalled from the alleged incident seven years earlier.
Trump responded via Twitter, calling the man in the sketch “nonexistent,” and accusing Daniels of perpetrating “a total con job.”
Daniels, who at the time was represented by attorney Michael Avenatti, quickly filed a defamation lawsuit against Trump. But in December of 2018, a federal judge tossed out the lawsuit, saying that Trump’s remarks were protected under the First Amendment as “rhetorical hyperbole.” The judge ordered Daniels to pay Trump’s legal fees—nearly $300,000.
In the Tuesday hearing, Trump lawyer Charles Harder told the judges that Trump did not intend his tweet to be taken as a factual accusation that Daniels had simply made up her story of the threat. Instead, Harder said, Trump’s statements were “the modern-day equivalent of calling B.S. or saying bunk or malarkey or hooey or garbage or I don’t buy it.”
Asked by Judge Kim Wardlaw, a Bill Clinton appointee, if Trump was calling Daniels a liar, Harder said that he was not, and that Trump had “never used those words,” or directly asserted that Daniels was lying about the alleged threat. Instead, Harder argued, Trump was merely stating his “opinion.”
But Daniels’ lawyer, Clark Brewster—who replaced Avenatti in March of 2019—scoffed at Harder’s claim. Trump, he said, was well aware of the threat attempt against Daniels, and in fact included language about the incident in a non-disclosure agreement signed by Daniels.
“It was negotiated at the time and known by Trump at the time that this man had accosted and threatened an assault upon her,” Brewster told the appeals court. “It was in the contract, but then [he] claimed, ‘I don’t know anything about it.’”
Brewster also argued that the lawyers had presented no evidence of Trump’s “goodwill,” which he said was necessary because “his default is to be reckless in his statements.” At the same time, Trump’s lawyers included information about the adult films in which Daniels has appeared in their court briefs, even though they were not permitted to use that information to “smear” her in the lower court.
Brewster told the judges that he took pride in Daniels for “for standing up and fighting here.”
Photo By James Chang / Wikimedia Commons
