President Trump is going after porn star Stormy Daniels for $300,000 in legal fees after a federal judge threw out her defamation suit against him, according to a report on Tuesday.
Trump’s lawyers in a court filing argued that they want $341,559.50 in attorney’s fees from Daniels, who alleged she had a sexual affair with the president in 2006, the Washington Examiner reported.
Daniels “filed this action, not because it had any merit, but instead for the ulterior purposes of raising her media profile, engaging in political attacks against the president by herself and her attorney, who has appeared on more than 150 national television news interviews attacking the President and now is exploring a run for the presidency himself in 2020,” the documents filed Monday in Los Angeles federal court say.
“This is a number created out of whole cloth,” her lawyer Michael Avenatti said in a statement to the newspaper. “And it is nothing compared to what he will owe my client from the main NDA case.”
Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, sued the president in April after he tweeted that her allegation that she was threatened by a man in a Las Vegas parking lot to remain quiet about the alleged affair was a “total con job.”
Federal Judge James Otero earlier this month dismissed the lawsuit on First Amendment grounds, saying the tweet “constitutes ‘rhetorical hyperbole’ normally associated with politics and public discourse.”
He ordered Daniels to pay Trump’s legal fees.
Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen paid Daniels a $130,000 hush payment weeks before the 2016 election as part of a nondisclosure agreement not to talk about the alleged affair.
Daniels is also suing the president over the agreement, saying it should be nullified because Trump never signed it.
Trump has denied the affair.
