US President Donald Trump has been ordered by a California court to pay adult movie actress Stephanie Clifford – stage name Stormy Daniels – $44,100 extra as attorney fee for her legal battle to cancel a hush-money deal brokered to keep Daniels quiet about her sexual relationship with Trump a decade ago.
The order in a Los Angeles Supreme Court said that Daniels won her lawsuit against Trump over an agreement that was signed in 2016, 11 days before that year’s presidential elections.
As part of that deal, the losing party had to pay the lawyer’s fee.
Earlier, the president’s former lawyer, Michael D Cohen, paid $130,000 to Daniels as part of a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) between the two parties. After Trump’s election, Daniels sued to void the agreement.
Background
Trump and his supporters have for long denied knowing anything of such payment before Trump finally acknowledged it in May 2018 and said he had reimbursed Cohen for the money he had paid to Daniels.
Daniel’s suit over the NDA was dismissed even before going into a trial as both the parties were no longer quiet about the incident. Daniels gave an interview in May 2011 to a magazine that decided not to publish it till the scandal broke in January 2018.
Trump’s lawyers said that Daniels didn’t win the case and therefore wasn’t entitled to any lawyer fee but the California court ruled in Daniels’ favour.
Since Donald Trump became president, Daniels has been a part of the adult industry using her brand for promotional activities. Currently, she’s working on a reality show where a team of investigators hunt ghosts.
Meanwhile, Trump’s former lawyer, Cohen, pleaded guilty for fraud and for lying to Congress and sentenced to 3 years in prison in 2018.
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)