Ms. Clifford’s lawyer, Michael Avenatti, had called the tweet an attack on his client’s credibility, arguing that Ms. Clifford should be compensated for what he called the resulting “harm to her reputation, emotional harm, exposure to contempt, ridicule, and shame,” along with threats to her physical safety.

The money now owed by Ms. Clifford to compensate Mr. Trump’s team of lawyers for their work on the case over nearly six months will not be insignificant. While Charles J. Harder, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, said Monday that the fees had yet to be determined, the case required several lawyers and multiple court filings. At least four lawyers represented the president at a recent court hearing in Los Angeles, and one filing drew on research that cited more than three dozen cases as precedent.

The defamation suit — filed last April in federal court in Manhattan and later transferred to California at the request of Mr. Trump’s lawyers — stands apart from Mr. Avenatti’s efforts to nullify the nondisclosure agreement that Ms. Clifford signed days before the 2016 election, agreeing to keep quiet about the affair that Ms. Clifford said occurred in 2006. Mr. Trump, whose statements about that nondisclosure agreement and the $130,000 payment that went along with it have changed over the course of the year, has denied there was an affair.