Stormy Daniels ‘Threat’ Claim Draws Cease-and-Desist Letter

CYBERSPACE—Following Stormy Daniels’ dramatic claim in her Sunday 60 Minutes interview that she and her infant daughter were threatened by an unidentified man in a Las Vegas parking lot in 2011—a man who, she said, specifically mentioned Donald Trump’s name—the lawyer for Trump’s personal “fix-it guy” fired off a cease-and-desist letter claiming that the threat never happened. Brent Blakely, a lawyer representing Michael Cohen—who himself is Trump’s longtime personal lawyer—wrote to Daniels’ lawyer, Michael Avenatti, demanding that Avenatti and Daniels “cease and desist from making any further false and defamatory statements about (Cohen).” Read that entire letter at this link. But Daniels never said in the interview that the unidentified man who made the alleged threat was connected to Cohen. “I was in a parking lot, going to a fitness class with my infant daughter. Taking, you know, the seats facing backwards in the backseat, diaper bag, you know, gettin' all the stuff out,” she said in the interview. “And a guy walked up on me and said to me, ‘Leave Trump alone. Forget the story.’ And then he leaned around and looked at my daughter and said, ‘That's a beautiful little girl. It'd be a shame if something happened to her mom.’ And then he was gone.” But the cease-and-desist letter was not the first time that Trump-connected lawyers have used the heavy-handed tactic. Earlier this year, Trump’s legal team sent off a cease and desist letter to the publisher of a tell-all book, Fire and Fury by author Michael Wolff, but the publicity from that letter appeared only to spur increased sales for the book. In fact, a USA Today investigative report from 2016 found hundreds of instances in which the Trump team used similar tactics, attempting to overwhelm weaker opponents, rather than working to prove Trump’s side of a given case. “The Trump teams financially overpower and outlast much smaller opponents, draining their resources,” the paper found. “Some just give up the fight, or settle for less; some have ended up in bankruptcy or out of business altogether.” While Trump himself offered no comment, even on his Twitter account, following the Daniels interview on 60 Minutes, he did post a tweet about “fake news.” “So much Fake News. Never been more voluminous or more inaccurate. But through it all, our country is doing great!” he wrote on his Twitter feed Monday morning. The 60 Minutes interview with Daniels pulled in the highest ratings for the iconic, 50-year-old news program in nearly a decade, according to the industry news site Deadline.com. The interview, which lasted for two segments of the three-segment broadcast, registered a rating of 16.3 with a 27 share—meaning that 16.3 percent of the total television audience were watching the interview, while 27 percent of households actually watching television during the hour that 60 Minutes aired were tuned to the broadcast. That’s the highest rating for 60 Minutes since a November 2008 interview with Barack and Michelle Obama just days after Obama was first elected president. The Obama interview 10 years ago scored a 17.4/26 rating.