Stormy Daniels settled her lawsuit against the Columbus, Ohio, police department in September, as AVN.com reported, winning $450,000 in the suit over her wrongful arrest last year by Columbus vice cops as Daniels performed in a local strip club.
In the lawsuit, Daniels alleged that the cops set her up because of her public opposition to Donald Trump. At the time of the arrest in July of 2018, Daniels was in the midst of her headline-making lawsuit against Trump over a “hush money” payment meant to silence her over a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006.
But now, Trump says that he wants some of that $450,00 in cash owed to Daniels from the arrest lawsuit. According to an Associated Press report on Wednesday, Trump’s lawyers have filed a notice with the court that oversees the payout of Daniels’ settlement. The lawyers say that about $293,000 of that cash should go to Trump.
The money Trump says he is owed stems from another lawsuit—a defamation suit Daniels and her then-attorney Michael Avenatti filed against Trump. In 2018, when Daniels claimed that she had been physically threatened in a Las Vegas parking lot by a man who invoked Trump’s name, Trump post a tweet calling her claim “a con job.”
Daniels and Avenatti quickly filed a defamation lawsuit—which was dismissed just a few months later, in October of last year. Trump then claimed that Daniels’ owed him hundreds of thousands in attorney’s fees for the lawsuit.
Those attorney’s fees form the basis for Trump’s claim against Daniels’ settlement cash from the Columbus cops. Trump’s lawyers claimed they were owed $342,000 in fees by Daniels, but a judge knocked that figure down to approximately $293,000.
The notice was filed this week by Dan Binau, a lawyer in Columbus who represents Trump.
The filing creates an unusual situation in which Trump and Avenatti, who for most of 2018 was one of Trump’s most highly visible and outspoken detractors, are now on the same side — against Daniels. Avenatti has rapidly fallen from grace since splitting with Daniels, and now faces federal charges that he swindled her out of nearly $300,000 from an advance against her book royalties.
But shortly after the Columbus settlement was announced, Avenatti sued Daniels claiming that the money should rightfully be his, because, he alleges, she failed to pay him his fees for representing her.
Photo By WCMH TV YouTube Screen Capture
