NEW YORK (LifeSiteNews) – The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered porn actress Stephanie “Stormy Daniels” Clifford to pay former President Donald Trump $121,972 in legal fees related to Trump’s condemnation of her claim that she was threatened for alleging the two had an affair.
Daniels first alleged the 2006 affair in 2011, when Trump was a private citizen. Trump has consistently denied the claim, insisting that “Horse Face … wouldn’t be the one” if he had been inclined to cheat on his wife. Daniels signed a statement in 2018 that the affair “never happened,” but later claimed her attorney and business manager pressured her into recanting.
The allegations resurfaced in 2018, halfway through Trump’s presidency, with the added revelation that Trump attorney Michael Cohen arranged a $130,000 payment to Daniels to keep quiet about it in October 2016, a month before Trump was elected.
That payment is the subject of left-wing Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s recent indictment of Trump, which claims the payment was a campaign expenditure not recorded as such. Many have assailed the unprecedented effort to prosecute the former president as legally dubious and politically motivated.
The New York Post reported that Daniels also claimed that, after alleging the affair in 2011, an anonymous man approached her and threatened her to “leave Trump alone. Forget the story,” and that her daughter was “a beautiful little girl. It’d be a shame if something happened to her mom.”
Trump fired off a tweet in 2018 bemoaning a “sketch years later about a nonexistent man. A total con job, playing the Fake News Media for Fools (but they know it)!” Daniels filed a defamation suit over that tweet, and the court dismissed the suit on the grounds that the tweet “constitutes ‘rhetorical hyperbole’ normally associated with politics and public discourse,” and as such was protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
The $121,972 follows approximately $300,000 the court already ordered Daniels to pay Trump. Daniels claims she will go to jail before paying Trump anything.
Congratulations to President Trump on this final attorney fee victory in his favor this morning. Collectively, our firm obtained over $600,000 in attorney fee awards in his favor in the meritless litigation initiated by Stormy Daniels. https://t.co/ld7SVvZOp6 pic.twitter.com/1b5P3flxFb
— Harmeet K. Dhillon (@pnjaban) April 4, 2023
I will go to jail before I pay a penny
— Stormy Daniels (@StormyDaniels) March 22, 2022
The political meaning and ramifications of the Bragg prosecution continue to be hotly debated. Supporters of Trump’s bid for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination claim that Democrats are trying to eliminate Trump because they fear the prospect of him returning to office; some who would prefer another GOP standard-bearer, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, suggest Democrats want to goad Republicans into rallying behind a candidate they see as easier to defeat in a general election. Still others contend that Bragg, who campaigned on hounding Trump, is simply playing to Manhattan voters’ left-wing sentiments.
While polls are fluid and the 2024 primary contest has not yet begun in earnest, a Yahoo/YouGov survey conducted after the indictment found Trump widening his national lead over DeSantis (57%-31% in a two-man race, 52%-21% in a 10-person primary field). With general election voters, however, a recent CNN/SSRS poll found that 76% recognize the indictment as politically motivated, but 60% still approve of it.