Stormy Daniels Is Ordered to Pay Trump $293,000 in Fees and Sanctions

(Bloomberg) -- Stephanie Clifford, the adult-movie star professionally known as Stormy Daniels, was ordered to pay $292,000 in attorney fees and $1,000 in sanctions to Donald Trump after she unsuccessfully sued the president for defamation.

Trump's lawyer had asked for $389,000 in fees for defending the lawsuit and for an equal amount in sanctions to deter Clifford from filing "frivolous" claims. A federal judge in Los Angeles on Tuesday awarded Trump 25 percent less than what he requested for his lawyer and said steep sanctions aren't necessary on top of the “substantial” fee award.

“They received less than one half what they asked for because the request was gross and excessive,” Clifford's lawyer, Michael Avenatti, said in an email after the ruling.

Earlier this year, Clifford said she was threatened by an unknown man in a Las Vegas parking lot in 2011 for agreeing to cooperate with a magazine article about a tryst she says she had with Trump in 2006. After her lawyer released a composite sketch of the man, Trump accused Clifford in an April tweet of “a total con job" concerning a “nonexistent man.”

U.S. District Judge James Otero threw out Clifford's lawsuit in November, saying Trump's “defaming” tweet was protected free speech.

Otero said in Tuesday's ruling that deterrence seems to be working because Clifford is trying to withdraw another defamation claim pending in his court and she hasn't taken further legal action against Trump “despite rhetorically hyperbolic statements” he's made about her recently. In October, Trump called Clifford “horseface” in a tweet and said he “can now go after” her and “her 3rd rate lawyer.”

Clifford still has a case pending in Los Angeles to challenge the non-disclosure agreement she signed with Trump's then-lawyer Michael Cohen to prevent her from discussing the alleged affair. Trump and Cohen both have said they won't enforce that agreement and that the case should be thrown out as moot.

“Stormy will never have to pay a dime” of the money awarded to Trump Tuesday, Avenatti said, “because they owe her over $1 million in attorneys' fees and costs from the NDA case, especially in light of Cohen's guilty plea.”

The case is Clifford v. Trump, 18-cv-06893, U.S. District Court, Central District of California (Los Angeles).

To contact the reporter on this story: Edvard Pettersson in Los Angeles at epettersson@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Elizabeth Wollman at ewollman@bloomberg.net, Peter Blumberg, Steve Stroth

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