Porn star Stormy Daniels is vowing she “will go to jail” before coughing up the $300,000 in legal fees she’s been ordered by a court to pay former President Donald Trump after losing her defamation lawsuit appeal against him.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Daniels Monday in her appeal related to a defamation lawsuit first filed in 2018 by her former – and now disgraced – attorney Michael Avenatti.
Daniels, who makes adult films, claimed to have had an affair with Trump back in 2006, about a year after he married his current wife Melania. Trump has denied that the encounter ever happened.
"As I have stated many times throughout the years, I never had an affair with Stormy Daniels, nor would I ever have wanted to," he said in a statement Monday.
Daniels had claimed Trump defamed her by mocking a sketch she and Avenatti publicly released back in 2018, purportedly of a man she says threatened her on the street to keep quiet about Trump back in 2011. At the time, Trump mocked the sketch and her accompanying claim on Twitter, posting: “A sketch years later about a nonexistent man. A total con job, playing the Fake News Media for Fools (but they know it)!”
A judge agreed that the tweet did not, in fact, amount to defamation, and “constitutes ‘rhetorical hyperbole’ normally associated with politics and public discourse in the United States” and protected by the First Amendment. The Ninth Circuit upheld that ruling Monday.
Even still, Daniels says she'll accept prison time before paying Trump a cent.
I will go to jail before I pay a penny
— Stormy Daniels (@StormyDaniels) March 22, 2022
But if she's that keen on going to jail, perhaps she can say hi to Avenatti.