Stormy Daniels sues Donald Trump for defamation

[Brainspore]

@brenbart

I’m curious though where the majority of porn producers fall in the political spectrum. Maybe the are hardcore conservative Republicans and this kind of publicity would be bad.

Stormy Daniels herself once briefly ran for the Senate as a Republican.

[TheGreatParis]

What was Trump saying about “opening up the libel laws?”

[bolamig]

Good work if you can get it!

[ficuswhisperer]

Meanwhile, not to be outdone…

Roy Moore Is Back & Suing The Women Who Accused Him Of Sexual Misconduct

[Akimbo_NOT]

@Papasan

Stormy Daniels Day! It’s time America!

Only if her middle initial doesn’t begin with the letter ‘T’. Rather not extend a weekend with a vacation day for STD Day if you know what I mean.

[EylerWerve]

I know a little about media law. This is all correct, as far as I remember.

The other piece of this is that the case hinges on factual evidence of this threat being made. To defend the case, Trump may have to produce a lot of factual evidence of his communications around the time of the threat and so on, provided a judge agrees it would be informative to the court. If Daniels is making this up, no big deal. if Daniels isn’t making this up, Trump really, really doesn’t want to face discovery by her attorneys.

Daniels already knows which of those is the case here. We’ll find out.

[NashRambler]

Thanks. I had suspected as much.

[NashRambler]

@anon62122146

Yeah, but making him testify about his thugs under oath would be worth it even if it didn’t wind up technically meeting the definition of defamation.

Worth it to us, but what about her?

[anon50609448]

@roomwithaview

This is interesting, as it is a much more specific and literal statement and not merely a matter of opinion. Or does the law consider that the word has lost the original meaning and is now in the general lexicon of non-specific insults?

Yeah, no one can reasonably argue when you use that word you are actually suggesting they had sex with their own mother. It just means you don’t like the person. In general I don’t think expletives have any literal meaning. I had a dictionary that defined “fuck” and gave a few different meanings, the last one being "Sometimes used to mean nothing at all. e.g. Then he picking up some fucking balls and started to fucking juggle them.

@EylerWerve

The other piece of this is that the case hinges on factual evidence of this threat being made. To defend the case, Trump may have to produce a lot of factual evidence of his communications around the time of the threat and so on, provided a judge agrees it would be informative to the court.

I think the issue for Trump is that he can’t actually produce any evidence that it didn’t happen. It could have happened without Trump’s knowledge. What kind of evidence could he produce?

To prove her case, she doesn’t have to prove that Trump sent someone to threaten her, she just has to prove that the threat happened. Since the standard of proof is civil rather than criminal, the case may come down largely to whether a judge finds her credible. Assuming she told a friend or two about the threat the day it happened, it becomes a very easy case to make.

Of course judges are people and normally I’d say suing the president for defamation is going to make your case very difficult. But when the president is widely known as the least credible person on Earth and is regularly critical of the judiciary and the idea of the law as a whole I’d guess human failings of judges are working in Daniels’ favour.

@Brainspore

The last time someone sued him for defamation over a tweet it basically got dismissed on the grounds “Trump is a buffoon who spouts ridiculous bullshit and insults all day long, so why would anyone take anything he says on Twitter seriously?”

I have to admit it’s a fair point.

It is a fair point, and potentially a real defense. But it’s a question that up to a judge. I trust judges to know the law, but I since it’s a judge ruling on a particular set of facts, I think it’s not reasonable to guess that it will be dismissed because of this. I mean, Trump’s twitter being a dumpster fire works in Trump’s favour here. But Trump’s twitter being official statements of the whitehouse doesn’t.

I read the popehat explainer and I think he agrees with me on that (even if he has a better sense of the probabilities). But what he adds that I didn’t understand is the whole thing about a different standard being used for public figures and needed to prove actual “malice”, and here “malice” is a bizarre legal term that means nothing like “malice” (otherwise it would be easy to prove that Trump had malice, since that’s actually all he has). Instead it means “knew the statement was false when he made it.” That’s a tough hurdle.

On the other hand, I find the discussion of anti-SLAPP laws a little disgusting. For those who don’t know, SLAPP is Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. The point of anti-SLAPP laws are to prevent large corporations from using courts to shut up people who disagree with them by tying those people up in bullshit lawsuits that the corporations can afford but the “little guy” can’t. The idea that a billionaire president could use such a law to defend his statement that a particular individual committed a crime is utterly against the point of those laws and should result in a rewrite of them.