FILE - In this Feb. 11, 2007, file photo, adult film actress Stormy Daniels arrives for the 49th Annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, is suing President... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this Feb. 11, 2007, file photo, adult film actress Stormy Daniels arrives for the 49th Annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, is suing President Donald Trump and wants a California judge to invalidate a nondisclosure agreement she signed... (Associated Press) 
 
 LOS ANGELES (AP) — An adult film actress who has said she had sex with Donald Trump filed a lawsuit seeking to invalidate a nondisclosure agreement and "set the record straight," her lawyer said Wednesday. 
 
 Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles County Superior Court on Tuesday. She alleges that the agreement she signed days before the 2016 presidential election, which prevented her from discussing the alleged sexual encounters, is "null and void and of no consequence" because Trump didn't personally sign it. 
 
 Her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, said on morning news shows Wednesday that she wants "to set the record straight." He said on NBC there was "no question" Trump knew about the agreement, though he did not offer any proof. 
 
 Avenatti said Clifford wasn't looking to profit from her story. But he told CBS: "I don't know whether she's going to ultimately seek payment or not." 
 
 Clifford initially claimed she had sex with Trump once and then carried on a subsequent yearslong platonic relationship. 
 
 But the lawsuit filed Tuesday refers to her beginning an "intimate relationship" with Trump in 2006 that continued "well into the year 2007." She said the relationship included encounters in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, and Beverly Hills, California. Trump married his current wife, Melania Trump, in 2005. 
 
 She also has also previously denied through a lawyer that the two had an affair, but Avenatti said Wednesday that was to meet the terms of the nondisclosure agreement. Trump's attorney Michael Cohen has denied there was ever an affair. 
 
 Cohen has said he paid the porn actress $130,000 out of his own pocket as part of the agreement. He has also said that "neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms. Clifford, and neither reimbursed me for the payment, either directly or indirectly." 
 
 The lawsuit charges that the Oct. 28, 2016, "hush agreement" is legally invalid because it was only signed by Clifford and Cohen. The agreement refers to Trump as David Dennison and Clifford as Peggy Peterson, but an attached exhibit details their true identities. 
 
 On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said Trump has "made very well clear that none of these allegations are true." 
 
 "The president has denied the allegations against him and again this case has already been won in arbitration," Sanders said. 
 
 Sanders declined to elaborate and referred additional questions to Cohen, who did not respond to requests for comment on Tuesday and Wednesday. 
 
 An arbitrator in California issued a temporary restraining order last week that barred Clifford from disclosing any confidential information tied to the nondisclosure agreement or details about the arbitration hearing, according to a copy of the order that was obtained by NBC News. 
 
 Clifford's lawsuit alleges that Cohen had "surreptitiously initiated a bogus arbitration proceeding" against Clifford and within the last week used an "improper and procedurally defective arbitration proceeding hidden from public view." 
 
 The suit also charges that Trump and Cohen "aggressively sought to silence Ms. Clifford as part of an effort to avoid her telling the truth, thus helping to ensure he won the Presidential Election." 
 
 "To be clear, the attempts to intimidate Ms. Clifford into silence and 'shut her up' in order to 'protect Mr. Trump' continue unabated," the lawsuit said. Clifford alleges that as recently as last week, Trump's attorney tried to initiate an arbitration proceeding against her. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Lucey reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Jill Colvin in Washington contributed to this report. ||||| Washington (CNN) Sarah Sanders was asked a simple question by CNN's Jeff Zeleny on Wednesday afternoon: Did President Donald Trump know that his personal lawyer made a $130,000 payment to silence a porn star alleging that she had engaged in an extramarital affair with Trump? 
 
 "Not that I'm aware of," said the White House press secretary. 
 
 Which, as you may have noticed, isn't "no." 
 
 Now, ask yourself this: If Sanders could have said "no" -- flat out -- to the question of whether Trump knew that Michael Cohen was making a six-figure payment to keep a porn star from saying she had an affair with the President, don't you think she would have? 
 
 OF COURSE SHE WOULD HAVE. 
 
 Read More ||||| Ms. Clifford’s lawyer, Michael Avenatti, said that he did not consider the restraining order, dated Feb. 27, valid, and that his client would proceed with her lawsuit in open court. “This should be decided publicly,” he said. 
 
 Image The White House’s spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said on Wednesday that the president’s lawyer had won an arbitration proceeding against the actress. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times 
 
 Ms. Clifford’s nondisclosure contract, made public through her lawsuit, calls for disagreements to be settled through confidential, binding arbitration. The lawsuit was filed a week after Mr. Cohen initiated arbitration proceedings, but the court papers did not say what was at issue or refer to the restraining order. 
 
 The contract gives Mr. Trump the right to seek financial penalties of more than $1 million in arbitration should Ms. Clifford break or threaten to break her agreement to stay silent. It also gives him the right to obtain an injunction barring her from speaking while disputes are considered in arbitration or open court. Those terms prompted Ms. Clifford to change her plans about going public, according to two people familiar with the situation who were not authorized to speak about it. 
 
 Ms. Clifford had suggested she was free to speak out after Mr. Cohen disclosed last month that he had arranged the payment, prompting her to claim that the contract had been breached. 
 
 The restraining order took her by surprise. A close friend of Ms. Clifford’s, J. D. Barrale, said in an interview that she learned Mr. Cohen initiated arbitration proceedings when she landed on a flight from Los Angeles to Texas. “She was shocked,” Mr. Barrale said. 
 
 Mr. Avenatti said Ms. Clifford had “never even been provided an opportunity to respond” to Mr. Cohen’s action in arbitration. 
 
 A copy of the restraining order, obtained by The Times and first reported by NBC News, left open the possibility that it could be modified in the future. But Mr. Avenatti said he questioned its validity because it was brought on behalf of Mr. Cohen, not Mr. Trump. ||||| Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images. 
 
 To this besieged White House, the Stephanie Clifford (aka Stormy Daniels, aka Peggy Peterson) lawsuit against President Donald Trump might only register as a single locust on the plague scale. Stormy Daniels doesn’t even represent the most interesting sex scandal the White House has to confront this week. Nevertheless, her lawsuit poses a few interesting legal questions that some poor judge in Los Angeles Superior Court will have to very publicly grapple with. 
 
 The nature of the dispute is paradoxically convoluted. Clifford’s lawsuit seeks to invalidate a nondisclosure agreement requiring her to keep secret her sexual relationship with Donald Trump, but the lawsuit itself announces the nature of the relationship in the first paragraph of the suit’s factual background: 
 
 Ms. Clifford began an intimate relationship with Mr. Trump in the Summer of 2006 in Lake Tahoe and continued her relationship with Mr. Trump well into the year 2007. 
 
 Indeed, the opening of the barn doors surely preceded this lawsuit. Countless news outlets have already reported that Clifford had approached Slate’s Jacob Weisberg in late 2016 with details that match the allegations in the lawsuit. The Wall Street Journal has also reported on the details of a $130,000 payment made by Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, to Clifford at the height of the campaign. This payment may have been a violation of federal election law, but the point is that it speaks to how much the public already knows about this supposedly confidential case. 
 
 That arrangement had a nondisclosure agreement with a mandatory arbitration clause, of which Cohen availed himself late last month. Again, it’s all very labyrinthine. 
 
 Putting aside for the moment the question of whether Clifford’s lawsuit, by its being filed publicly instead of under seal, represents a breach of the nondisclosure agreement, the next most convoluted question involves Clifford’s attorney Michael Avenatti’s central claim that the agreement is invalid. He argues that there can be no confidential settlement to violate because, as he told NBC’s Today: “Mr. Trump did not sign. We believe that that was so that he could later claim deniability, and therefore, from a legal perspective, we believe she’s free to talk.” 
 
 Sure enough, Trump’s seismograph-like signature does not appear on the agreement, either as himself or by his latest alleged nom de plume, “David Dennison.” But if Clifford deposited the check, the court might view that act as a unilateral ratification of her end of the agreement. If a court interprets the parties’ conduct as evincing the existence of a contract, it wouldn’t then matter whether either party signed. 
 
 Whether Clifford’s attorney is right involves an area of contract law most lawyers last encountered on their first-year exam, known as the “statute of frauds.” Each state has its own such statute and they’re largely similar, but essentially it requires that certain types of contracts must be signed in writing by both parties. It’s well-established that a court can find a contract valid even where neither party signs simply by the conduct of the parties, though this rule is somewhat constrained in contracts governed by the statue of frauds. If a court deems this agreement as falling outside the statue of frauds, then Trump’s lack of signature might not matter. Generally, the types of contracts that require signatures are weighty and have lasting implications—real estate contracts, mortgages, long-term employment contracts, surety agreements, debts dischargeable in bankruptcy, and so on. 
 
 That a lawsuit seeking to undo the terms of an agreement could potentially violate that agreement suggests that we’re inside a farcical adaptation of the film Inception. 
 
 So the question for the court might be whether the Trump–Clifford nondisclosure agreement categorically squares with California’s enumerated statute of frauds. While the aforementioned types don’t quite fit, one interesting candidate is California Civ. Code 1624(a)(1), which requires a signature of the party to be charged or the party’s agent where the agreement, “by its terms is not to be performed within a year from the making” of the agreement. So the question is: What would that mean, with respect to this nondisclosure agreement, where Clifford is obligated to remain silent indefinitely, a period that could easily extend past a year? Despite that argument’s intuitive appeal, courts have mostly viewed indefinite duration contracts as not falling within this one-year provision, sometimes reasoning that the party could die within a year, sometimes finding validation where only one of the parties completes performance. Often, one party’s ratification (e.g., cashing the check) can serve as an exception to the statute of frauds. 
 
 Whatever the merits of Clifford’s argument that Trump’s failure to sign the agreement rendered it invalid, it may not ultimately matter because in order for Trump to prevail on the agreement he would have to take Clifford to court and enforce it. For a president of the United States to sue an ex–porn actress for revealing details of their extramarital affair allegedly occurring shortly after the birth of his son Barron would seem to be a politically fraught venture, even for a president as Teflon as Trump has proven to be. 
 
 One big caveat to consider here is that Cohen has already filed an arbitration proceeding pursuant to the agreement, with the lawsuit alleging that it was filed “surreptitiously” and without notice to Clifford, and that its purpose was to silence Clifford. The California court could perhaps tell Clifford that she needs to take her case to the same arbitration panel. Clifford’s response to that suggestion is implicit in her lawsuit—arguing that there is no agreement because Trump didn’t sign it. Accordingly, if there’s no agreement, the arbitration clause within can be disregarded. 
 
 The stakes are daunting enough for Clifford, at least on paper—the agreement contains a $1 million liquidated damages clause for each individual breach of the agreement, and it’s reasonable to assume that she doesn’t presently have $1 million in the bank. Whether or not filing such a lawsuit publicly might separately constitute such a breach, or multiple such breaches, is a rabbit hole beyond the scope of the rabbit hole we’ve already crawled down. That a lawsuit seeking to undo the terms of an agreement could potentially violate that agreement suggests that we’re inside a farcical adaptation of the film Inception. 
 
 At every stage of this story, the White House has simply pretended that Stephanie Clifford doesn’t exist. On Wednesday, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said that Trump had been unaware of the payment and that he denied the relationship took place, another point of contention of the lawsuit itself—the suit argues that it stretches credulity to argue Trump didn’t know about the payment—and one that would seem potentially to offer another avenue for invalidating it. If Trump was not even aware of the agreement, how could he agree to it and how could Cohen even have acted as an agent on his behalf in signing? Then again, what Trump supposedly paying $130,000 for was the right to pretend none of this ever happened. Harvey Weinstein can probably sympathize. 
 
 Ultimately, if Trump chooses to enforce the agreement against Clifford in court it will serve as a tacit admission of Clifford’s underlying story. However, if a court throws out the suit and the enforcement is made in arbitration, then we may never get the full story. Perhaps the lesson here is that nondisclosure agreements over personally embarrassing incidents involving the rich and famous aren’t particularly useful as anything more than a calculated bluff, when the revelations can’t be undone by 1 million uncollectable dollars. ||||| Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. 
 
 / Updated By Sarah Fitzpatrick 
 
 President Donald Trump's lawyer is trying to silence adult-film star Stormy Daniels, obtaining a secret restraining order in a private arbitration proceeding and warning that she will face penalties if she publicly discusses a relationship with the president, NBC News has learned. 
 
 The new pressure on Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, comes a day after she filed a lawsuit in a Los Angeles court alleging that a nondisclosure agreement she made to keep quiet about an "intimate" relationship with Trump is invalid because he never signed it. 
 
 Tuesday's lawsuit says that Trump attorney Michael Cohen — who brokered the agreement with Clifford during the presidential campaign — attempted to "intimidate" Clifford and "shut her up" by initiating what it calls a "bogus arbitration proceeding" against her in Los Angeles on Feb. 27. 
 
 On that day, Cohen obtained a temporary restraining order against Clifford from the private arbitrator, a retired judge, which bars her from disclosing "confidential information" related to the nondisclosure agreement signed in October 2016, according to a copy of the order obtained by NBC News. 
 
 Read the temporary restraining order against Stormy Daniels 
 
 On Feb. 28, Cohen emailed the restraining order to Clifford's former attorney, Keith Davidson. "The document itself is to remain confidential and not to be disclosed to anyone as per the terms of the judge's order," the email, obtained by NBC News, said. 
 
 Reached for comment late Wednesday afternoon, Clifford's current attorney, Michael Avenatti, said Cohen, through his own attorney, Lawrence Rosen, has made further attempts to enforce the order and caution Clifford that she is subject to damages if she talks about Trump. 
 
 "Earlier today, Mr. Cohen through his attorney, Mr. Rosen, further threatened my client in an effort to prevent her from telling the truth about what really happened," Avenatti said. "We do not take kindly to these threats, nor we will be intimidated." 
 
 Cohen and Rosen did not immediately respond to requests for comment from NBC News. 
 
 But Rosen, who has represented Trump and his companies in the past, said in a statement to other media outlets that the agreement with Clifford contained an arbitration clause with permission to "seek an injunction in the event of a breach or threatened breach of the agreement." 
 
 “The designated judge from the arbitration tribunal found that Ms. Clifford had violated the agreement and enjoined her from, among other things, filing this lawsuit," Rosen said in the statement. 
 
 White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a press briefing Wednesday that Trump denies "all of these allegations" — that he had an affair with Clifford more than a decade ago or that he knew Cohen had paid her $130,000. 
 
 "I have had conversations with the president about this and as I outlined earlier, this case had already been won in arbitration," Sanders said. It's unclear what Sanders was referring to; Trump is not listed as a party on the restraining order issued by the arbitration judge. 
 
 Asked about that comment, Avenatti quipped, "Yeah, and he won the popular vote, too." 
 
 Analysis: Stormy Daniels isn't suing Donald Trump for cash 
 
 “President Trump hasn’t won anything relating to Ms. Clifford," he added. 
 
 "First of all, it does not appear as if he was even a party to the arbitration Ms. Sanders is referring to. How can you win something you’re not even a part of? Secondly, claiming that Mr. Trump ‘won’ at arbitration when there has been no hearing, no notice to Ms. Clifford, no opportunity given to her to respond, and no decision on the merits, is completely bogus." 
 
 Earlier on Wednesday, Avenatti told "Today" that Clifford's lawsuit, if successful, would allow his client to "tell her story." 
 
 "She believes it's important that the public learn the truth about what happened," he said. "I think it's time for her to tell her story and for the public to decide who is telling the truth." 
 
 The suit asks a California court to affirm that the agreement Clifford signed is invalid. 
 
 The "hush agreement," as it's called in the suit, refers to Clifford as Peggy Peterson and another individual as David Dennison. In one of the documents, the true identity of Dennison is blacked out, but Avenatti said the individual is Trump. 
 
 Clifford signed both the agreement and a side letter agreement using her professional name on Oct. 28, 2016, just days before the 2016 presidential election. Cohen signed the document the same day. Both agreements were appended to the lawsuit as Exhibit 1 and Exhibit 2. 
 
 Each document includes a blank where "DD" is supposed to sign, but neither blank is signed. 
 
 Clifford and Trump had an intimate relationship that lasted from the summer of 2006 "well into the year 2007," and meetings in Lake Tahoe and at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the lawsuit alleges. In the past, Cohen has said the president denies there was ever a relationship. 
 
 The lawsuit says that Cohen — who says he used his personal funds to facilitate a payment to Clifford — has been trying to scare the actress into not talking. 
 
 "To be clear, the attempts to intimidate Ms. Clifford into silence and 'shut her up' in order to 'protect Mr. Trump' continue unabated," says the suit. "On or about February 27, 2018, Mr. Trump's attorney Mr. Cohen surreptitiously initiated a bogus arbitration proceeding against Ms. Clifford in Los Angeles." 
 
 The nondisclosure agreement said any further dispute would be resolved by binding arbitration "to the greatest extent permitted by law." 
 
 If the agreement is void because Trump didn't sign it, as Clifford argues, the arbitration clause would also be unenforceable.
– President Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, got a restraining order against Stormy Daniels last month in an attempt to keep the adult film star from speaking out about her alleged 2006 affair with Trump, the New York Times reports. The temporary Feb. 27 order, obtained in a private arbitration meeting with a retired judge, prohibits Daniels (whose real name is Stephanie Clifford) from discussing "confidential information" related to the nondisclosure agreement she signed in Oct. 2016, NBC News reports. Daniels' lawyer tells NBC that Cohen has continued to make efforts to silence Daniels via "threats" and "intimidation" since the order was procured, warning her she is subject to damages should she talk. In her lawsuit against Trump attempting to have the NDA declared invalid, filed Tuesday, Daniels refers to a "bogus," "improper and procedurally defective arbitration proceeding hidden from public view," the AP reports. Cohen's own attorney says the NDA Daniels signed included an arbitration clause with permission to "seek an injunction in the event of a breach or threatened breach of the agreement," and that "the designated judge from the arbitration tribunal found that Ms. Clifford had violated the agreement and enjoined her from, among other things, filing [her lawsuit against Trump]." Also Wednesday, White House rep Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that Trump denies "all of these allegations"—both the affair and any knowledge of Cohen's $130,000 payment to Daniels—and that "this case [has] already been won in arbitration." Her exact meaning was not clear, as Trump is not listed as a party on the restraining order, and CNN's Chris Cillizza notes several of Sanders' "non-answers" skirt the issue of whether Trump knew about the hush money. If all of this seems a lot to wrap your head around, you're not alone; Slate calls it "convoluted to the point of paradox."