Stormy Daniels legal case is ‘denying Trump free speech’

LAWYERS for President Donald Trump have asked a federal judge to dismiss a defamation lawsuit by porn star Stormy Daniels, calling it an attempt to suppress the president’s free speech.

In a motion filed in Los Angeles federal court, Mr Trump’s lawyers also said that Ms Daniels, who has said she had a sexual encounter with Mr Trump in 2006 and was threatened to keep quiet about it, had benefited from the attention brought by her dispute with the president.

Her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, called the motion “baseless and desperate”.

Ms Daniels’s lawsuit, filed on April 30, centres on her account of being accosted by a man in a Las Vegas car park soon after she had agreed in May 2011 to talk about her alleged encounter with Mr Trump to ‘In Touch’ magazine.

Ms Daniels has said the man told her to “leave Trump alone” and, after looking at her infant daughter, said: “That’s a beautiful little girl. It’d be a shame if something happened to her mom.”

On April 17, Mr Avenatti released a composite sketch purporting to depict the man.

Mr Trump, who has denied having an affair with Ms Daniels, responded the next day on Twitter: “A sketch years later about a nonexistent man. A total con job, playing the Fake News Media for Fools (but they know it)!”

Ms Daniels said the tweet was defamatory. In their motion, Mr Trump’s lawyers said the lawsuit was “designed to chill the president’s free speech rights.”