A lawyer for Stormy Daniels has requested in federal court to take a deposition from Donald Trump, in a legal battle over an agreement to keep the porn star quiet about her allegation that they had a sexual relationship.



Attorney Michael Avenatti also asked to depose the president’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, whom Daniels is suing for defamation, a motion filed in US district court in the central district of California showed on Wednesday.

Avenatti said in the motion he would need no more than two hours to question each of the men.

“We’re looking for sworn answers from the president and Mr Cohen about what they knew, when they knew it and what they did about it,” Avenatti told the Associated Press.

While he noted that “in every case you always have to be open to settlement”, Avenatti said “at this point we don’t see how this case would possibly be settled”.

Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, originally sued Trump on 6 March, saying he had never put his signature on a $130,000 agreement for her to stay silent in 2016, just before the presidential election, about what she called their “intimate” relationship, which she says occurred in 2006 and 2007, when Trump’s wife Melania had recently given birth to their son, Barron.

Cohen has said he paid the $130,000 out of his own pocket, while asserting that Trump never had sex with the porn actor.

On Monday, after Daniels appeared in a widely watched TV interview on 60 Minutes on CBS, Avenatti filed an amended lawsuit claiming that Cohen had defamed his client by suggesting she was a liar.

Daniels said in the interview that she was threatened by an unidentified man she believed to be linked to Trump.

In a statement to CBS, Cohen’s attorney David Schwartz called the filing a “reckless use of the legal system in order to continue to inflate Michael Avenatti’s deflated ego and keep himself relevant”.

A hearing before Judge James Otero in Los Angeles is set for 30 April.

As precedent, the motion references the fact that Bill Clinton was deposed while in office in 1998 during the Paula Jones sexual harassment suit. That came after the supreme court ruled a sitting president was not immune from civil litigation on something that happened before taking office and was unrelated to the office.

Jones’s case was dismissed by a judge, then appealed. The appeal was still pending when Clinton agreed to pay $850,000 to settle the case. He did not admit wrongdoing.

Trump, who has denied allegations of sexual misconduct from multiple women, has denied having an affair with Daniels.

A White House spokesman, Raj Shah, said on Monday: “With respect to that interview, I will say the president strongly, clearly has consistently denied these underlying claims. The only person who’s been inconsistent is the one making the claims.”

Trump is also being sued by Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model who says she had an affair with Trump around the same time as Daniels, and Summer Zervos, an Apprentice contestant who accused the billionaire of sexual harassment and is suing for defamation.

Such controversy does not seem to have hurt Trump’s standing with supporters – the president’s approval rating is up seven points since last month, according to a new poll by the Associated Press-Norc Center for Public Affairs Research.

Trump’s approval is at 42%, low for a president at this point in his first term.