August 22, 2020

Judge Orders Trump to Pay Stormy Daniels $44,000 in Legal Fees

It’s a small victory in an endless legal battle.

Stormy Daniels and Michael Avanatti in 2019Mjt/AdMedia/ZUMA

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

It’s been a bad week in court for President Donald Trump. First, Steve Bannon—his former campaign chief and White House aide—was arrested and charged with defrauding donors who had supported a privately funded effort to build a border wall. Then Trump lost his legal bid to delay handing over his tax returns to New York prosecutors. And now, a California judge has ordered him to pay $44,000 in legal fees to porn star Stephanie Clifford, better known as Stormy Daniels.

The fees stem from Daniels’ fight to be released from a nondisclosure agreement she signed with former Trump attorney Michael Cohen in October 2016, during the presidential campaign, in which Cohen paid her $130,000 in exchange for keeping quiet about her alleged affair with Trump. Trump, who has denied having an affair with Daniels, later reimbursed Cohen for the payment. 

Daniels claimed that the NDA was invalid because Trump himself never signed it. She ultimately prevailed in the case after Trump agreed not to try to enforce the contract or to seek repayment of the $130,000. Cohen, meanwhile, was sentenced to three years in prison for tax evasion and campaign finance violations related to the hush-money payment. While the legal case was largely moot, Daniels continued to press for Trump to pay her legal fees and expenses that were required to win the case. On Monday, a California Superior Court judge awarded her $44,100 in legal fees as the prevailing party but denied her motion to recoup about $10,000 in expenses.

Daniels and Trump have been embroiled in legal disputes for years now, and while this week’s award is a big win for Daniels, it’s small change compared to what she owes Trump in legal fees from a different case. In 2018, represented by Michael Avanatti, Daniels filed a defamation lawsuit against Trump over a tweet that attacked her credibility. A federal judge found Trump’s tweet to be protected opinion, dismissed the case, and ordered her to pay Trump nearly $300,000 in legal fees for a case that lasted but six months. 

After the decision, Avanatti tweeted, “We will appeal the dismissal of the defamation cause of action and are confident in a reversal.” He added, “There is something really rich in Trump relying on the First Amendment to justify defaming a woman.” A few months later, Avanatti was arrested on extortion, fraud, and embezzlement charges. He was subsequently charged with stealing nearly $300,000 from Daniels herself. That case is supposed to go to trial in October. Meanwhile, Daniels has continued to appeal the dismissal of her defamation case and the fee award—meaning that her legal battle with Trump may last longer than his presidency or even the alleged affair that started it all.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate