Stormy Daniels Asks Court for New Trump Defamation Case Hearing

LOS ANGELES—In late July, the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals slapped down Stormy Daniels’ appeal of her defamation lawsuit against Donald Trump. The case had taken almost two years to reach the appeals court, after a federal judge in Los Angeles tossed out the case in October of 2018.  But the AVN Hall of Famer is not ready to give up yet. On Friday, her attorney Clark Brewster filed a petition with the Ninth Circuit to hear the case again, this time with 11 judges deciding the case, rather than just three — as in the initial appeal.  The case dates back to April, 2018, when Daniels and her then-attorney Michael Avenatti appeared on the ABC-TV program "The View," where they revealed a forensic sketch of a man who, according to Daniels, accosted and threatened her in a Las Vegas parking lot — invoking Trump’s name as part of the threat. Trump reacted quickly on his Twitter account, claiming that the sketch showed “a nonexistent man,” and accusing Daniels of “a total con job, playing the Fake News Media for Fools.” In her lawsuit, Daniels said that Trump’s apparent claims that she fabricated the description of the man in the sketch, and was perpetrating “a total con job” had defamed her, in effect accusing her of committing a felony. But in October of that year, federal Judge James Otero ruled that Trump’s statements were easily recognized as “hyperbole” of the type typical in political discourse. “The First Amendment protects this type of rhetorical statement,” Otero ruled, alos ordering Daniels’ t pay Trump nearly $400,000 in legal fees.. Almost two years later, three Ninth Circuit Appeals Court judges agreed, saying that Trump’s statements in the tweet “could not reasonably be read as asserting that (Daniels) was committing a crime,” and were instead “a colorful expression of rhetorical hyperbole.” In his filing on Daniels’ behalf August 14, Brewster argues that the three-judge panel made a mistake by applying a Texas law against so-called SLAPP suits, which allowed Otero to quickly dismiss the case and impose penalties against Daniels. In fact, federal rules should have applied instead, Brewster argued. Federal rules in defamation cases are more lenient with plaintiffs, requiring that they only make a “plausible” claim of defamation. The Texas SLAPP rules require that the plaintiff, in this case Daniels, must present “clear evidence” of each defamation claim. SLAPP is an acronym for “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation,” meaning a lawsuit designed to silence the defendant by causing them to undergo the expense and inconvenience of a court case. Brewster also argued that because the statements appeared on Trump’s Twitter account, where he often makes official presidential pronouncements, his statements about Daniels would be considered factual by a reasonable reader. Photo By Inside Edition YouTube Screen Capture