Adult film star Stormy Daniels brought her defamation suit against President Donald Trump to federal court Monday — and the judge indicated he was not impressed.
U.S. District Court Judge S. James Otero did not rule from the bench, but told the aging porn performer’s’ attorneys that it appeared a tweet by Trump that named her appeared to be speech protected by the First Amendment.
Daniels’ jackass attorney Michael Avenatti had filed the suit on her behalf after Trump sent out a tweet dismissing comments she had made in broadcast interviews.
When Daniels said in a TV interview that a man had confronted her in 2011 after alleging an affair with Trump in an attempt to silence her, the president tweeted that the accoster who made the threats was a “non-existent man” and that her allegation was a “total con job.”
But, Otero said it appeared to him that the tweet was protected as free speech since it related to a matter of public concern and involved public figures.
Daniels was “in the process of making her story known to the world,” Otero said. He said the president’s tweets appeared to be “hyperbole that would be protected.”
Such speech “lies at the heart of the First Amendment” and to try to restrict it would have a “chilling effect on candidates running for office,” the judge said.
Judge Otero was not impressed. He will rule later, by the handwriting is on the wall, folks.
Trump’s attorneys noted that the tweet was purely opinion in the realm of political speech.
“It’s all protected free speech,” said attorney Charles Harder.
Mentally impaired
In April, noted First Amendment attorney Marc Randazza derided Daniels’ defamation action in a blistering rebuke of Avenatt’s legal skills.
Randazza noted:
Stormy’s claim is based on Trump’s exercise of his free speech rights. Trump was writing on a public forum about a highly publicized dispute. The dispute would have been a matter of public concern anyhow, but Clifford and her attorney have fluffed the public relations value of this case like nobody has fluffed anything since the invention of Viagra (which made the fluffery sciences as a porn career go the way of the buggy whip).
Today Otero also scheduled hearings in December to discuss Trump’s efforts to dismiss another lawsuit by Daniels over a hush-money agreement related to their alleged affair.
Trump, Michael Cohen and a company formed by Cohen want the lawsuit dismissed. Daniels wants the case to continue with Trump and Cohen ordered to be deposed about the allegations.
Daniels filed a Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit in March 2018 against Trump and Essential Consultants. The case was subsequently transferred to federal court and Cohen was added as a named defendant.
Michael Avenatti, the attorney representing Daniels, argued in a Sept. 10 court filing that dismissing the case without a resolution of the allegations “would be premature and would erode public confidence in the courts.”
LMFAO What a jackass.
“After leading this court to believe for six months that they had a good faith basis to assert that the settlement agreement was a valid contract, that it was not illegal, and that it had nothing to do with Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, the court cannot simply allow defendants to exit the case without facing any true consequences or a meaningful inquiry into the truth,” wrote Avenatti.
He previously told CNN that Trump and Cohen want the case dismissed so they can avoid being deposed about their actions.
We’ll update when the federal court formally rules on Daniels’ ill-fated defamation suit.
h/t: CNN
4 Responses
Wonder where Stormy found this ambulance chaser?
Karma, I have an idea but I am not going to say it because he would sue my ass and I really don’t wish to fly to Texas to fight a defamation case (I do realize that it is my first amendment right to say it but it isn’t worth six figures in legal fees for me to do so). I do think he needs to go back under that rock he crawled out from under to take on Ms. Daniels as a client, though! Any moron knows you don’t fight the President of the United States over shit like this, you will have the IRS doing a cavity search on you to look for “unreported income” by the end of the month and the CIA/FBI/Secret Service torturing your ass the minute our current president becomes Dictator of the United States — which will likely happen the minute Congress starts impeachment proceedings or some state prosecutor starts charging him with crimes. I hope you like being beaten by a CIA agent’s nightstick or baseball bat, hogtied, handcuffed, suspended by your wrists or neck from the ceiling, waterboarding, electrocution and lead pipes (or Sarah Fuckabee-Sanders’ strap-on) up your ass, Mr. Avenatti. I hope Ms. Daniels likes the same along with Secret Service agent dick up her ass, up her cunt and down her throat at the same time.
BTW, how many times has Ms. Daniels been audited by the IRS since she opened this Pandora’s Box? I bet it has been done for each of her last seven years tax returns by now.
lol having the IRS come after him would be a dream come true for Avenatti who’d milk it doing paid media appearances despite getting his wish to bar media from bankruptcy testimony and ‘irrelevant’ $10 million unpaid judgement against him and law firm(s) he’s playing corporate shell games with to avoid paying.
The IRS remark was sort of flippant but Nixon did it to his enemies so it isn’t a stretch that Trump would do it, too. The whole post was sort of flippant but unfortunately it has a ring of possibility to it, Trump is the kind of person that would pull a coup and eliminate our current form of government to protect himself from state prosecution with some legal staff claiming that he can’t pardon himself from state charges he may face in New York State (my read of the Constitution and past precedent pre-Obama tells me he can pardon for state crimes but I think Trump would pull a coup and become dictator rather than risk a protracted court fight and with control of the military it wouldn’t be hard for him to do).