Judge May Toss Stormy Daniels’ Defamation Lawsuit Against Trump

During a Monday hearing in a Los Angeles federal courtroom, a judge strongly hinted that he would dismiss a defamation lawsuit by Stormy Daniels against Donald Trump over a Twitter posting Trump made in April of this year, according to media reports out of the hearing, which was still going at around 4 p.m. Monday afternoon. In April, after Daniels and her lawyer Michael Avenatti revealed a forensic sketch of a man that the AVN Hall of Famer says threatened her, using Trump’s name, in a Las Vegas parking lot in 2011, Trump took to Twitter to call Daniels’ story of the threat “a total con job,” and said that the man depicted in the sketch was “nonexistent.” Daniels quickly sued Trump for defamation, for in effect calling her a liar. In August, as AVN.com reported, Trump’s lawyers filed papers with the court saying that Trump’s statements were protected as “free speech.” But according to a Twitter post by New York Daily News reporter Nancy Dillon, who is covering the hearing for that paper, Judge S. James Otero told Avenatti that he feels Trump’s claim was simply harmless bluster. "In (the) court's view, it appears to be rhetorical hyperbole," Otero told Avenatti, according to Dillon’s report. The judge did not, however, issue a ruling or say when he would rule, according to a CNN report. In a statement following the hearing, Avenatti blasted Trump’s attempt to use the First Amendment to defend his “con job” statement. “This is the same Donald Trump that has crapped all over the First Amendment and the news media for years, and wants to jail journalists,” Avenatti said. “And yet today, in an effort to negate the ability of my client to sue him for defamation, he now wants to espouse the First Amendment. The irony associated with that is absolutely palpable.” Los Angeles Times reporter Michael Finnegan, who was also in the courtroom, said that Otero appeared to be “casting strong doubts on Stormy Daniels’ defamation case against Trump.”  The hearing was set to decide the next steps in Daniels’ original lawsuit against Trump, in which she seeks to be officially released from a “hush” agreement she signed in exchange for a $130,000 payoff, to keep quiet about a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006. She signed the agreement and received the cash just days before the 2016 presidential election. Daniels has been largely ignoring the agreement for most of this year, even authoring an upcoming book in which she discusses the sexual episode with Trump is highly graphic detail. But earlier in September Trump withdrew from the lawsuit, saying through his lawyers that he would no longer enforce the “hush” agreement—and stating the deal was never valid in the first place, even though he had earlier countersued Daniels for a whopping $20 million, citing her repeated violations of the non-disclosure agreement. At the Monday hearing, Trump’s lawyers planned to ask Otero to dismiss Daniels’ hush money lawsuit, according to a report by Los Angeles TV station KTLA. But Avenatti has said that he would seek to continue the lawsuit and force Trump to sit for a sworn deposition. Photos By Mark Nozell, Wikimedia Commons/ABC TV Screen Capture