Trump faces trouble if he tries to keep porn star Stormy Daniels silent, legal experts say
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The White House said Wednesday that President Trump previously has won an arbitration case against adult film star Stormy Daniels, who alleges an affair with Mr. Trump and is suing him.
Time
WASHINGTON – The salacious details of Stormy Daniels’ alleged affair with Donald Trump more than a decade ago have seeped out to the public, but the porn-star-turned-household-name has been barred from telling the story herself.
That might soon change, according to legal experts, despite a temporary restraining order the president’s legal team won last week against Daniels, who is fighting in court to tell her story about their alleged tryst.
A legal document, referred to as a “hush agreement,” she said she signed weeks before the 2016 presidential election keeps her from dishing on Trump, but it could paint the president in a corner, said Imre Szalai, a national expert on arbitration law with the Loyola University School of Law in New Orleans.
Trump and his legal team can try to keep Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, silent through arbitration — and his lawyers indicated that’s the preferred course.Â
If the president admits being a party to an agreement that paid Daniels to stay quiet, the Federal Election Commission would probably view it as a violation of campaign finance law, Szalai wrote on his Outsourcing Justice blog.
If Trump doesn’t contest Daniels’ ability to go public, she could embarrass the president, who’s been accused of sexual harassment by several women and was recorded on a Hollywood Access tape boasting about grabbing women sexually.
“If the hush payment violated election law, then this lawsuit and the procedural dilemmas concerning the enforcement of the arbitration agreement have placed Trump in a Catch-22 situation if he or the company seeks to compel arbitration,” Szalai wrote.
That could put Trump in even more legal peril because it might draw the interest of special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating whether there were links between the Trump campaign and Russians who allegedly sought to influence the 2016 presidential election, said Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University.
“This is well within Mueller’s wheelhouse,” Turley said. “Mueller could seek answers about the payment.”
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Michael Cohen, an attorney for Donald Trump, arrives in Trump Tower in New York on Dec. 16, 2016. Stormy Daniels, the porn star whom President Donald Trump’s personal attorney acknowledged paying $130,000 just before Election Day, believes she is now free to discuss her alleged sexual encounter with Trump, her manager xtold The Associated Press Wednesday, Feb. 14, 2018. Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, believes that Cohen invalidated a non-disclosure agreement after two news stories: One, in which Cohen told The New York Times that he made the six-figure payment with his personal funds, and another in the Daily Beast, which reported that Cohen was shopping a book proposal that would touch on Daniels’ story, said the manager, Gina Rodriguez. Â
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Stormy Daniels’ attorney says Trump knew about hush money paid to porn star
Read More: Read Stormy Daniels’ lawsuit against Donald Trump
Daniels filed a lawsuit Tuesday against Trump, claiming that a $130,000 settlement she reached with Trump’s longtime lawyer Michael Cohen to keep quiet about the alleged relationship was no longer valid because Trump had not signed the document. The lawsuit marked the first time Daniels openly spoke of having a “hush” agreement.
In the suit, Daniels claimed she had an affair with Trump in 2006 and 2007. She said Cohen and Daniels signed the agreement to secure her silence Oct. 28, 2016, days before the presidential election.Â
Tom Spiggle, a Washington attorney familiar with non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) in the workplace, said Daniels found a creative way to air her story legally despite the restrictions on her ability to speak out.
“Litigants are protected (within reason) from being penalized for what they say in court pleadings. So she is able to say that she had an affair with Donald Trump as necessary background for the declaratory action without being in violation of the NDA — even though she’d be in violation of the NDA for saying the exact same thing outside of court,” he said. “This means Daniels has found a way to have her cake and eat it, too.”
In a round of television interviews Wednesday to discuss the case, Daniels’ lawyer Michael Avenatti insisted that the president must have known about the $130,000 payment to Daniels in October 2016.
“The suggestion that you would have an experienced, educated attorney like Mr. Cohen who would run off, half-cocked without any knowledge of his client, that he would negotiate and draft a detailed agreement that included his client as a party, that he would engage in weeks of negotiation, that he would reach agreement, that he would then send $130,000 in connection with that agreement, that he would then later institute an arbitration proceeding without knowledge of his client, all of this to those of us that practice under the law as attorneys, it’s ludicrous,†Avenatti said on CNN.
Daniels is scheduled to appear this weekend at the Solid Gold strip club in South Florida, which is promoting the event as Daniels’ first public appearance since filing suit against Trump.
“Stormy no longer wishes to remain silent, and SOLID GOLD proudly supports her right to speak,” according to the club’s Facebook page.
Contributing: David Jackson, USA TODAY
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