The lawyer for adult film star Stormy Daniels, who has been caught up in a legal battle with President Trump over an alleged extramarital affair, said that Trump’s silence on the matter leading up to and following a big “60 Minutes” interview indicates Trump is “scared.”
“We didn’t think that he would stay silent this long and I think it’s pretty clear — he is scared of my client and perhaps of me,” Michael Avenatti told MSNBC during an interview Tuesday evening, adding, “and he should be.”
Avenatti said it’s possible Trump has remained publicly mum on the topic because Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, has not been “punching hard enough,” but said it’s more likely he due to him knowing Clifford is telling the truth.
Clifford’s interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” aired on Sunday, where she claimed she was threatened by a man in a Las Vegas parking lot in 2011 to keep quiet about her alleged 2006 sexual encounter with Trump, just after she tried to sell the story to a tabloid.
Trump has yet to comment on the interview directly. The closest he got was a tweet Monday, which said, “So much Fake News. Never been more voluminous or more inaccurate. But through it all, our country is doing great!”
Avenatti teased more details have yet to be revealed that weren’t disclosed in the “60 minutes” interview.
“There is a lot of embarrassing information that has yet to come out,” Avenatti said. “There is a mountain-load of evidence, and so perhaps that is why he is continuing to deny it.”
Last week Avenatti sent out a tweet featuring a photo of a DVD in a safe, which he later explained is a “warning shot.”
Clifford signed a nondisclosure agreement on the alleged affair in 2016 and was paid $130,000 by Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen. However, she filed a lawsuit earlier this month claiming the NDA should be nullified because Trump didn’t sign it.
On Monday, Daniels expanded the lawsuit to include Cohen, whom she argues defamed her by implying she lied. The amendment to the lawsuit also argues that the confidentiality agreement was unlawful since it did not include Trump’s signature, and says the payment disobeyed federal campaign laws.
The White House has denied Trump was ever involved in an affair with Clifford.
