Over at Hullabaloo, digby joins Greg Sargent in speculating that Stormy and Trump’s other accusers may spell real trouble for him. Sargent notes that:
As CNN’s Collinson points out, this means Trump may be facing a period of pretrial discovery and possibly a deposition, which “could put Trump in a perilous position.
I haven’t seen another aspect of this mentioned. Take Summer Zervos’s defamation suit, for example. She isn’t subject to any non disclosure agreement, so Trump’s lawyers have resorted to the silly defense that a presidential candidate can slander anyone they like because it’s protected political speech. That dog won’t hunt, says the judge, so the suit is on.
It would seem that Summer could make her case, in part, by proving that a) Trump has a pattern and practice of doing to others what she says he did unto her, and b) that he has lied about others like he lied about her. That means she may seek to depose Trump’s other victims as well as Trump himself. And while Strormy may not be a victim in the same sense as Summer, it couldn’t hurt to depose her to see if she has anything to add to Summer’s case.
Non-disclosure agreements, including Stormy’s, typically contain clauses that carve out an exception for testimony given in response to a lawful subpoena, and that, presumably, would include a subpoena to a deposition. Testimony given in depositions is not subject to any kind of non-disclosure agreement unless the parties agree to it, or the judge orders it, and why would any party opposing Trump agree to it, and on what basis would a judge order it? In fact, if I were representing Summer, I’d ask for the identities of any woman with whom Trump is a party to a non-disclosure agreement. Why not?
So, these stories may come out, with nothing that Trump can do about it. I suspect that within a fair percentage of the judiciary Trump is loathed, and it’s unlikely that he’ll get much sympathy from most judges hearing these cases.
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