Porn actress ordered to pay Trump’s legal fees

A federal judge in Los Angeles on Tuesday ordered pornographic film actress Stephanie Clifford, who goes by the name Stormy Daniels, to pay President Donald Trump nearly $300,000 in legal fees for a defamation suit she brought against him earlier this year. Clifford claims that in 2006 she had a brief affair with Trump and that days before the 2016 presidential election she signed a nondisclosure agreement with former Trump attorney Michael Cohen. In an earlier lawsuit, which is still pending, she challenged the nondisclosure agreement.

Cohen has since pleaded guilty to facilitating hush money payments to Clifford and another women who claims to have had an affair with Trump. The president has denied both affairs but federal prosecutors said he directed Cohen to make the payments.

Clifford also said that in 2011 an unknown man approached her in a Las Vegas parking lot and threatened her to keep quiet about the alleged affair. After she released a sketch of the man, Trump called the claims a “total con job.” Clifford sued, and her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, called the president’s remarks “false and defamatory.” In October, U.S. District Judge S. James Otero dismissed the defamation lawsuit, saying the tweet was “rhetorical hyperbole” and that “the First Amendment protects this type of rhetorical statement.”

Trump attorney Charles Harder called Tuesday’s ruling “a total victory for the president,” while Avenatti said it would not hold up on appeal.