Manager says porn star free to tell Trump story

NEW YORK — Stormy Daniels, the porn star whom Donald Trump’s attorney acknowledges paying $130,000 just before Election Day, believes she is now free to discuss an alleged sexual encounter with the man who is now president, her manager said Wednesday.

At the same time, developments in the case are fueling questions about whether such a payment could violate federal campaign finance laws.

The porn star, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, believes that Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, invalidated a nondisclosure agreement after two news stories were published Tuesday, said the manager, Gina Rodriguez. In one, Cohen told The New York Times that he made the six-figure payment with his personal funds, and in the other, the Daily Beast reported that Cohen was shopping a book proposal that would touch on Daniels’ story.

“Everything is off now, and Stormy is going to tell her story,” Rodriguez said.

At issue is what happened inside a Lake Tahoe, Nev., hotel room in 2006 between Trump, then a businessman and reality TV star, and Clifford, who was promoting a porn production company during a celebrity golf tournament.

In the years since, Clifford has claimed that she and Trump had sex once and then carried on a subsequent yearslong platonic relationship. But she has also, through a lawyer, denied the two had an affair. Trump’s lawyer, Cohen, has denied there was ever an affair.

In January, The Wall Street Journal reported that a limited liability company in Delaware formed by Cohen made the six-figure payment to the actress to keep her from discussing the affair during the presidential campaign.

Cohen said the payment was made with his own money and that “neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms. Clifford, and neither reimbursed me for the payment, either directly or indirectly.”

He was responding to inquiries from the Federal Election Commission, which is investigating an advocacy group’s complaint that the October 2016 transaction violated campaign finance laws.

The payment was not reported as an expenditure nor as an in-kind contribution, and the origin of the money is still unclear, said Paul Ryan, a vice president at Common Cause, the group that filed the complaint.