These are weird times, what with the genius threatening the stability, and perhaps even the existence of the world, but there are things that can still make us laugh. This is one of them:
Adult film star Stormy Daniels sued President Donald Trump on Tuesday, alleging that he never signed a nondisclosure agreement that his lawyer had arranged with her.
The civil suit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court and obtained by NBC News, alleges that her agreement not to disclose her “intimate” relationship with Trump is invalid because while both Daniels and Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen signed it, Trump never did.
Stephanie Clifford, known professionally as Stormy Daniels, signed both the agreement and a side letter agreement using her professional name on Oct. 28, 2016, just days before the 2016 presidential election. Cohen signed the document the same day. Both agreements are appended to the lawsuit as Exhibit 1 and Exhibit 2.
Click here to read the “Hush Agreement” and the side letter agreement
The “hush agreement,” as it’s called in the suit, refers to Trump throughout as David Dennison, and Clifford as Peggy Peterson. In the side letter agreement, the true identity of DD is blacked out, but Clifford’s attorney, Michael Avenatti, says the individual is Trump.
Each document includes a blank where “DD” is supposed to sign, but neither blank is signed.
According to the lawsuit, which Avenatti announced in a tweet, Clifford and Trump had an intimate relationship that lasted from summer 2006 “well into the year 2007.” The relationship allegedly included meetings in Lake Tahoe and at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
via NBC News
I followed a link to NBC from here, where the folks at Crooks and Liars post a tweet from someone named Susan Simpson, who observes:
This lawsuit is a work of legal art. If you are Trump, do you:
A) argue that your agreement to pay hush $$ to the porn star was a valid & legally enforceable contract; or
B) argue that there is no contract, and the porn star is free to talk about your affair?It’s…beautiful.
I’ve just read skimmed the agreements, but the only defense I can imagine that doesn’t constitute an admission would be a claim that the court in which it was filed lacks jurisdiction, and that won’t fly as it’s quite clear from the agreement that jurisdiction is proper.
I would just like to observe that I pointed out the Catch 22 nature of Trump’s predicament several weeks ago, when I observed the following about any potential lawsuit brought by Trump or Cohen to enforce the agreement:
As a practical matter, in my humble opinion, she’s been free all along, because the genius and/or Cohen would have run up against a bit of a Catch 22 had they brought suit to enforce the agreement, since the act of bringing the suit would have amounted to an acknowledgment of the truth of what she was saying.
I didn’t know at the time about the contract’s requirement of “confidential arbitration”, but Stormy’s lawyer has effectively dealt with that little impediment. This is merely the mirror image of the situation I posited. Bringing the action in this way is really a master stroke. It will be interesting to see how they respond. My guess is that Stormy will find herself free to make some bucks at the genius’s expense. I should mention as well that the agreements seem to make specific references to pictures and text messages, implicitly putting the lie to Cohen’s claim that he was silencing a liar.
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