Adult-film star Stormy Daniels reportedly threatened to cancel a nondisclosure agreement about her alleged sexual encounter with President Trump just days before the 2016 election.
An attorney for Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, sent an email to Trump’s personal lawyer on Oct. 17, 2016, threatening to cancel the agreement as she had not yet received a payment to keep quiet about the alleged affair, The Washington Post reported Friday.
“Please be advised that my client deems her settlement agreement canceled and void,” Daniels’s lawyer wrote in a second email, obtained by the Post.
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On the same day, Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen created a limited liability company that would ultimately be used to transfer the $130,000 payment to Daniels, the Post reported. The payment reportedly arrived 10 days later.
The story did not come into the public eye until January of this year, when The Wall Street Journal reported on the payment to Daniels.
Cohen originally denied the payment, but later told The New York Times that he had paid the $130,000 out of his own pocket. He defended the payment as coming from himself following complaints filed by watchdog groups that the money had been paid out of the Trump campaign and not reported as a campaign expense, violating campaign finance law.
Daniels reportedly spoken openly about the consensual affair in past years. After the Wall Street Journal report, InTouch magazine published a 2011 interview with Daniels about the affair, which allegedly occurred in 2006, when he was married to first lady Melania Trump.
A manager for Daniels said last month that she now believes that Cohen’s comments about the payment have broken the nondisclosure agreement, leaving her free to talk about the affair.