A federal court on Monday dismissed a defamation suit from aging adult-film star Stormy Daniels that claimed President Trump libeled her when he suggested she had lied about being threatened to keep quiet about their alleged relationship.
The tremendous legal defeat was predicted by industry attorney Marc Randazza months ago.
U.S. District Judge S. James Otero in Los Angeles ruled that Trump’s speech was protected by the First Amendment as the kind of “rhetorical hyperbole” normally associated with politics and public discourse in the United States.” He ordered Daniels to pay Trump’s legal fees.
Trump attorney Charles Harder cheered Otero’s decision.
“No amount of spin or commentary by Stormy Daniels or her lawyer, Mr. Avenatti, can truthfully characterize today’s ruling in any way other than total victory for President Trump and total defeat for Stormy Daniels,” Harder said in an emailed statement.
Con job
In a “60 Minutes” interview in March, Daniels said that she and her daughter had been threatened in 2011 by an unknown man in a parking lot in Las Vegas who told her to “leave Trump alone.” The alleged incident occurred during a time when she was in talks with a magazine about going public with her story of the tryst with Trump at a Lake Tahoe celebrity golf tournament in 2006.
When she went on “The View” the next month, Daniels revealed a composite of the man’s face drawn by a sketch artist based on her memory of the incident.
Trump, after the program ended, tweeted that she was “playing the Fake News Media for Fools (but they know it)!”
On April 30, she filed the defamation suit, arguing that Trump had posted a false statement against her that was defamatory because it suggested she was falsely accusing a man of committing a crime.
Otero disagreed. “Mr. Trump’s tweet displays an incredulous tone, suggesting that the content of his tweet was not meant to be understood as a literal statement” about Daniels.
The judge adds in the court document: “If this Court were to prevent Mr. Trump from engaging in this type of ‘rhetorical hyperbole’ against a political adversary, it would significantly hamper the office of the President.”
#Basta
The ruling represents the latest blow for Daniels and her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, who has raised a national profile from his legal battles against the president and is contemplating a presidential bid in 2020.
Avenatti called the ruling “limited” on Twitter and said it did not affect Daniels’s primary case against Trump and his former attorney Michael Cohen, which seeks to invalidate her 2016 nondisclosure agreement.
“Daniels’ other claims against Trump and Cohen proceed unaffected,” Avenatti wrote in a tweet he later appeared to have deleted.
He said in a second tweet that any fees Trump might be awarded from the defamation case would “be dwarfed by the fees he and Cohen will be required to pay in connection with the NDA case.”
Later, Avenatti tweeted that he had appealed Otero’s ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.
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