Helen's son, a top-notch international arbitration expert, is taking some time away from being a lawyer by spending a year or two communing with nature. Rather than turning to Maureen Dowd about the legalistic intricacies of how Señor Trumpanzee can keep the fact that he has serially hired prostitutes to urinate on him-- and , no, not just in Moscow-- away from his credulous fan-boys, we turned to our own expert about Stormy Daniels and the arbitration deal. He said it was somewhat complicated but suggested there are two main things we should keep our eyes on:
Even if a contract requires you to arbitrate disputes you can almost always still go to court for what we'd call "interim relief." A TRO (temporary restraining order) falls into this category. It doesn't decide the underlying dispute, it just decides the status quo while the dispute is pending in arbitration.A TRO is one of the few things you can sometimes get ex parte, or without the other party present. The person asking for the TRO has to show that if the TRO isn't granted they'll suffer irreparable harm that can't be compensated by money damages. They also usually have to show a likelihood of success on the merits and some kind of urgency. TRO's are short term orders and once in place can be challenged by the other side. You usually need to follow up with a more involved preliminary injunction proceeding if you want to keep the TRO relief in place for any length of time. Preliminary injunctions can't be obtained ex parte.My guess is that here Trump's lawyers showed a copy of a contract with a gag order to the judge and said that, assuming the contract is valid, Trump would suffer irreparable harm if the woman violated it by talking. So until an arbitrator can decide who's right and wrong under the contract, the woman can't discuss it. On its face, that's what the contract requires of her.Make sense? Of course, simply admitting the existence of an arbitration proceeding itself proves that there was a contract since arbitration is contractual by nature. So it's clear that Trump had a contract with a porn star, which is exactly what he's trying to say he didn't have...
So did Stormy piss in Trump's face or on his back or what? And how much did Trump pay the prostitutes to pee on him? Did he haggle and negotiate deals? Is it more expensive in NYC than in Moscow? Now, that's where you'd turn to Dowd and today's Times column, The First Porn President. Trump, she wrote, "is determined to be our most shameless president, running a White House awash in salacious stories and louche characters." And awash in pee-pee?
Asked by reporters Wednesday how Republicans would have responded if President Barack Obama had been charged with cavorting with a porn star (right after his wife had a baby, no less), Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana replied, “I don’t know,” adding, “This is no country for creepy old men.”Trump’s love life, it seems, boasts more pseudonyms than Frank Abagnale Jr.Stormy Daniels’s real name is Stephanie Clifford, but she was called Peggy Peterson, or “P.P.” (shades of the dossier!), and Trump was referred to as David Dennison in the 2016 legal agreement Trump lawyer Michael Cohen drew up to buy her silence before the election for $130,000. (He registered a whole new company in Delaware for this purpose. More tax benefits!)Stormy, the star of 2016’s Sex Bots: Programmed for Pleasure, has learned to be litigious from the master. She sued, claiming the agreement is null and void because Trump, a.k.a. John Barron, John Miller and David Dennison, didn’t sign it. But Cohen slapped a restraining order on the actress, even as she sat for a 60 Minutes segment with Anderson Cooper this past week, presumably to dish without restraint on the Donald.Alana Evans, another blond porn actress, who has appeared in It’s Okay! She’s My Mother in Law 13 and Dirty Little Sex Brats 9, claims that Trump told her she should come along to his hotel room with Stormy that weekend in 2006 at the Lake Tahoe golf tournament, but she didn’t. Evans’s real name may or may not be Dawn Vanguard.Jessica Drake, yet another porn actress, who starred in Massage School Dropouts, appeared with Gloria Allred the month before the presidential election to accuse Trump of kissing her without permission and offering to pay her for sex at the SAME golf tournament, a charge Trump denied. In Cohen’s legal agreement, Stormy refers to Drake as Angel Ryan.The president, who often seems short-tempered, nasty and impatient with others and who has certainly been disrespectful to his wife, showed his sweet side to his mistresses in the skin trade.He actually took time out from showing Stormy a picture of himself on the cover of a magazine, according to her interview in In Touch Weekly, to ask her about her own work in the porn industry.“He was very curious,” she said. “Not necessarily about the sex or anything like that, but business questions.” Like how much she made off royalties from the movies.When she asked what was up with his hair, he laughed with her about it. He gave her his ultimate compliment, comparing her to Ivanka. And he didn’t ask to do anything kinky.“He wasn’t like, ‘Chain me to the bed’ or anything,” she reported, adding that the experience was “textbook generic.”While she ate swordfish in his room, he watched Shark Week and confided his terror of sharks, adding, “I hope all the sharks die.”Oddly, for such a germaphobe, he did not use a condom, she said.At the Tahoe golf tournament where Trump was pinballing among porn actresses, when his son Barron was a few months old, he also began an affair with a former Playmate of the Year named Karen McDougal, according to Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker. (Trump denies it.)When he offered her money after sex, McDougal said, she told him she was not “that girl” and he told her, “You are special.”The Stormy episode is exactly the kind of embarrassing episode that Trump wiggled out of for decades, denying that he knew women who accused him, playing the legal and media angles to kill stories, getting the help of friends and employees to pay off women.But times have dramatically changed, post-Weinstein.At the White House on Friday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders tried again to bury the story, saying, “We’ve addressed this extensively and I don’t have anything else to add.”But that isn’t going to mollify the millions of women who find the president’s behavior sordid and unacceptable. Trump and by extension the Republican Party are facing a gender chasm they may fall into in November.Disgusted with the Rat Pack role model at the top, women are lining up not just to vote, but to run for office. A historic number are running for Congress this year, and in Texas alone last Tuesday, 25 Democratic women won their primaries or advanced to a runoff.The White House will keep trying to dismiss Daniels as she is on her “Make America Horny Again” tour, but she’s not going away. As Muddy Waters famously sang the blues, “They call it stormy Monday, but Tuesday’s just as bad; Wednesday’s worse, and Thursday’s also sad.”
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