On the same day he was arrested in New York on charges related to an alleged payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, former President Donald Trump was awarded $121,962.56 in legal fees from Daniels in another case where the adult film star sued him for defamation.
Daniels sued Trump over his April 2018 tweet that said a forensic sketch of a man who allegedly threatened Daniels over Trump and Daniels’s purported affair in 2011 was a “total con job.” The judge dismissed the case and ordered Daniels to pay Trump’s legal fees in 2018, but she appealed the order, arguing the fees were too high.
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The fees are owed for work by lawyers at two law firms, Harder LLP and Dhillon Law Group, according to CBS News, which added that the court found that Daniels’s argument that Trump’s fee request was unreasonable and excessive “is not well-founded.”
Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, previously said that she would “go to jail before I pay a penny” to the former president. That comment came in March 2022 after a federal appeals court rejected the porn star’s effort to overturn a lower court’s ruling in her failed defamation lawsuit, causing her to owe $300,000 to Trump.
The former president’s son, Eric Trump, celebrated Tuesday’s ruling, saying the new fees awarded to his father are “in addition to the roughly $500k” Daniels already owes him.
Attorney Harmeet Dhillon, of Dhillon Law Group, tweeted her applause for Trump after the ruling.
“Congratulations to President Trump on this final attorney fee victory in his favor this morning. Collectively, our firm obtained over $600,000 in attorney fee awards in his favor in the meritless litigation initiated by Stormy Daniels,” Dhillon wrote.
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Trump was arrested and arraigned on Tuesday in Manhattan in a separate case related to Daniels. He was charged with 34 counts of business fraud following an investigation into hush money payments he made to two women in 2016, ahead of the presidential election. Trump has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges, and he is not expected in court again until December.
