Porn star Stormy Daniels “will never pay a dime” to President Trump, despite being ordered to pay nearly $293,000 in legal fees for a failed defamation case, her attorney Michael Avenatti says.
An attorney for Trump, however, says the adult actress has no choice, denying Avenatti’s assertion that Trump will have to pay Daniels more than $1 million in a separate case.
“She will never pay a dime out of pocket,” Avenatti told the Washington Examiner, calling the Tuesday ruling “meaningless because the fees in the [non-disclosure agreement] case dwarf the other fees. The $300,000 will never be paid because it is dwarfed by the over $1 million owed to Stormy. Why are you incapable of understanding this?”
Charles Harder, an attorney for Trump, said Avenatti was wrong about Trump owing Daniels money. “Mr. Avenatti’s claim that the president owes Stormy Daniels one dime is completely baseless and intended solely to deflect attention from the massive legal defeat that Stormy Daniels and Mr. Avenatti just suffered yesterday,” Harder said.
Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, was ordered to pay Trump’s legal fees after claiming he defamed her while denying a 2006 affair. In a separate legal fight, she sought to escape the terms of a non-disclosure agreement she signed in 2016, accepting $130,000 in exchange for her silence.
Avenatti said the NDA case “is already won based on the submissions — please read them.”
Trump’s legal team decided in September not to enforce the NDA, and there’s a hearing scheduled for Jan. 22, with a ruling expected a week or two later on Trump’s motion to dismiss, Harder said.
Harder said he expects Daniels to pay the legal fees in the defamation case. “One way or another I expect it to happen,” he said.
Since going public last year, Daniels has received significant support, including raising $580,000 on the crowdfunding website CrowdJustice. Avenatti recently said his firm had “spent well over a thousand hours of attorney time on the [NDA] case at a value of over $1,500,000.”
The porn star said last month that Avenatti sued Trump for defamation against her wishes and expressed concern about the whereabouts of the crowd-funded money, but she and Avenatti later reconciled.
