ABC News(NEW YORK) — Adult-film star Stormy Daniels has a “litany of more evidence” to back her allegation of an affair with President Donald Trump, her lawyer told Good Morning America Monday.
On the morning after a much-anticipated TV interview with Daniels, the professional name for Stephanie Clifford, lawyers representing both her and Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, traded threats over the validity of her claims.
“We have a litany of more evidence in this case, and it’s going to be disclosed and it’s going to be laid bare for the American public,” Clifford’s attorney, Michael Avenatti, said on GMA.
In Clifford’s interview on the CBS program 60 Minutes Sunday, the 39-year-old adult-film star said she had unprotected sex with Trump once in July 2006 after meeting him at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, California, and going to his hotel room.
The White House has denied allegations that Trump and Clifford had an affair.
Clifford said she was later threatened to keep quiet about her relationship with Trump by a mystery man who in 2011 approached her and her young daughter in a Las Vegas parking lot as she headed to an exercise class. The man told her, “‘That’s a beautiful little girl. It’d be a shame if something happened to her mom.'”
Clifford said the threat came after she had agreed to give an interview to In Touch magazine about her affair with Trump for which she was to be paid $15,000. The article on the affair was not immediately published after Cohen threatened to sue the magazine. Clifford says she never received money for the interview.
Clifford’s 60 Minutes interview came two months after The Wall Street Journal broke the news that Cohen had paid Clifford $130,000 in exchange for signing a non-disclosure agreement about Trump.
In early March, Clifford filed a lawsuit against Trump seeking to nullify the non-disclosure agreement, claiming it the contract was void because it lacked Trump’s signature.
Cohen’s attorney, David Schwartz, on GMA dismissed Clifford’s account in her TV interview as “lying.”
“The lying is all over that piece,” Schwartz said. “We don’t have to go further than the piece to see the lying, the inconsistencies, the fact that she said nothing happened and now she says something happened. She’s in it for the money. And Michael Avenatti is in it for all the press and money also.”
He called Clifford’s TV interview “completely flat” and said Avenatti continues to try the case in the press.
After the interview, another lawyer for Cohen, Brent Blakely, sent a letter to Avenatti singling out Clifford’s claims of the physical threat as “false and defamatory.”
“I hereby demand that you and your client cease and desist from making any further false and defamatory statements about my client, that you immediately retract and apologize to Mr. Cohen through the national media for your defamatory statements on 60 Minutes, and make clear that you have no facts or evidence whatsoever to support your allegations that my client had anything whatsoever to do with this alleged thug,” Blakely wrote in the letter.
But Avenatti refused to apologize Monday morning, telling ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos that the threat “had to have come from someone associated with Mr. Trump.”
“There’s no other place for it to have come from,” Avenatti said. “It didn’t come from the magazine. That makes no sense. It certainly didn’t come from my client. There’s only one other place that it could have come from, and that threat was terrifying to my client.”
Clifford said on 60 Minutes that her attorney advised her not to speak about other evidence she may have to bolster her claims of a one-night stand with Trump, including whether she has incriminating text messages or video.
Avenatti said on GMA that he advised his client to keep quiet about other evidence she might be holding “because we’re in the very early stages of this case and we’re not going to play all our cards at this juncture.”
“There’s going to be a lot of evidence that comes to light in the coming weeks and months and we’re confident that when all the facts are laid bare for the American people, they’re going to learn exactly what happened here,” Avenatti said.
Avenatti was asked by Stephanopoulos about why he tweeted a mysterious photo of a CD on Thursday night with the statement, “If ‘a picture is worth a thousand words,’ how many words is this worth?????”
The lawyer responded, “It was a warning shot to Mr. Cohen and the president that they better be very careful about denying what happened.”
“What’s interesting is we get a cease-and-desist letter,” Avenatti continued. “Where’s the statement from the president and Mr. Cohen claiming the affair didn’t happen.”
While Trump hasn’t publicly addressed Clifford’s allegations, he tweeted Monday morning, “So much Fake News. Never been more voluminous or more inaccurate. But through it all, our country is doing great!”
Schwartz said the agreement Clifford signed with Cohen has to go back to arbitration.
“Certainly Michael Cohen will not rest until he recover every single penny of damages, and it could be $20 million,” Schwartz said.
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