Stormy Daniels Book Makes Lawsuit Irrelevant, Trump Lawyers Say

Last week, Stormy Daniels published her first book, a memoir titled Full Disclosure—a book in which she described her 2006 sexual encounter with Donald Trump in painstaking detail, right down to the allegedly unusual appearance of Trump’s penis.  But if Trump’s lawyers have their way, based on a filing they made in a Los Angeles federal district court on Monday, publishing the book may have backfired in a big way, as they now claim that Daniels’ book, with its explicit and uncensored description of her tryst with Trump, has rendered her lawsuit against Trump obsolete. Daniels sued Trump in March, to invalidate a “hush” agreement she signed to keep her quiet about the affair—just days before the 2016 presidential election. A month ago, Trump first asked a federal judge to dismiss the lawsuit, saying that he would no longer seek to enforce the “hush” agreement  and that he never considered it valid anyway—even though he had earlier countersued Daniels for $20 million, over her alleged violations of the deal. The AVN Hall of Famer’s lawyer, Michael Avenatti, brushed aside the move, saying at the time that Trump was merely trying to avoid being subjected to a deposition in the case—with Avenatti doing the questioning. On Monday, however, Trump’s lawyers renewed the request for the judge to throw out Daniels’ lawsuit, saying that the details described in Daniels’ book—which currently ranks third on the Amazon.com sales ranking for political biographies and memoirs—render her lawsuit “moot,” according to Bloomberg News. Avenatti told Bloomberg that he was “not concerned” about Trump’s claim that the book invalidates Daniels’ lawsuit, saying that the case still has several outstanding issues that prevent a judge from summarily throwing it out. In addition to recovering attorney’s fees from Trump and his former “fixer” Michael Cohen, who is also named in Daniels’ suit, Avenatto said that he wants Trump and Cohen to sign a written admission that the $130,000 they paid Daniels in exchange for her silence was an illegal campaign contribution  intended to influence the 2016 election. Cohen has already admitted exactly that, in his August 21 guilty pleas to eight felonies in a New York federal court. Cohen in his pleas said that Trump ordered him to make the payment to Daniels, “for the principal purpose of influencing the election.” Photo by Adam Bielawski / Wikimedia Commons