Adult film actress Stephanie Clifford’s attorney on Monday said he believed someone connected to the Trump Organization threatened his client in a parking lot in 2011.
Clifford, known professionally as Stormy Daniels, said in a “60 Minutes” interview that aired Sunday that a man threatened her after she gave an interview about an alleged affair with Trump that had occurred years earlier.
The man, who Clifford said she would be able to identify today, “walked up on me and said to me, ‘Leave Trump alone. Forget the story,’” she recalled. Clifford said the man then “leaned around and looked at my daughter and said, ‘That’s a beautiful little girl. It’d be a shame if something happened to her mom.’”
Though Clifford didn’t say who she thought the man was, nor whether he had any connections to Trump, an attorney representing Michael Cohen — Trump’s personal lawyer who wrote up the nondisclosure agreement Clifford signed in 2016 — sent her a cease and desist letter regarding that portion of the interview, writing that Cohen “had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with any such person or incident, and does not even believe that any such person exists, or that such incident ever occurred.”
After tweeting Sunday that the threat “could only have come from one place,” Avenatti made his claim explicit in a round of interviews Monday morning: the man who threatened Clifford, he said, had a connection to Trump or Cohen, who was then an executive at the Trump Organization.
“It had to have come from someone associated with Mr. Trump,” he told “Good Morning America” host George Stephanopoulos.
“There’s no other place for it to have come from,” he continued. “It didn’t come from the magazine, that makes no sense. It certainly didn’t come from my client.”
Asked if he had any evidence tying Trump or his lawyer, Michael Cohen, to the threat, Avenatti said “other than common sense, no.”
“We are in the process of running to ground exactly who that was, and I am confident, at the end of this, that we’re going to discover it,” he told NBC’s “Today” host Savannah Guthrie.
“She can describe that person in great detail,” he added, referring to Clifford. “She remembers it like it was yesterday, because, like any mother in that situation, it was terrifying.”
“Have you shown her pictures of people that have worked for Donald Trump?” MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough asked on “Morning Joe.” “Has she identified the person that made the threat to you?”
“She has not identified the person as of yet,” Avenatti said, adding that aside from Clifford and the magazine, “there’s only one other party involved in this, and that’s the Trump Organization.
“We’re going to seek all kinds of records relating to this from them, no doubt,” he said, asked by Scarborough if he would seek phone records from the Trump Organization to Las Vegas around the time of the threat.
“Do you have any apology for Michael Cohen, for suggesting that he was connected to a thug in a garage somewhere?” CNN’s Alisyn Camerota asked, after reading Cohen’s attorney’s cease and desist letter.
“None,” Avenatti said.
