Ex-adult film star Stormy Daniels, whose legal birth name is Stephanie Gregory Clifford, has filed a petition to change her name legally to Stormy Daniels Barratt, according to legal documents cited by The Blast.
In the petition, filed in Los Angeles, Daniels says:
“I want to change my name to coincide with my entering into a new chapter in my life”.
The former porn star and stripper, 43, shot to notoriety after claiming she became intimate with Donald Trump in 2006 when his wife, Melania Trump, was pregnant with their son, Barron.
In January 2018, The Wall Street Journal reported that in 2016, before the presidential election, then presidential candidate Donald Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohen, paid $130,000 to Stormy Daniels to stop her from breaking a non-disclosure agreement over the affair she allegedly had with Trump in 2006, just after his wife Melania had given birth to their son.
Donald Trump has emphatically denied ever having the affair.
Cohen subsequently publicly acknowledged making the “hush” payment and pleading guilty to eight criminal charges in 2018.
Daniels filed three lawsuits amid the legal wrangling, winning the first, where she argued that her NDA was invalid. However, she lost the second lawsuit, in which she argued she had been defamed, and was ordered to pay almost $300,000 in legal fees and court sanctions.
In the third lawsuit, the ex-porn actress claimed that Michael Cohen had colluded with her previous attorney Keith Davidson against her interests when negotiating the payment. That suit was settled in May 2019.
In this Feb. 11, 2007, file photo, Stormy Daniels arrives for the 49th Annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles.
© AP Photo / Matt Sayles
Following a failed appeal of the decision in her defamation case against Trump in late March this year, Daniels tweeted, “I will go to jail before I pay a penny”. Meanwhile, the former POTUS hailed a “total and complete victory and vindication for, and of me”.