Avenatti claims Trump paid 'hush money' to 3 more women ahead of 2016 election

In this Thursday, May 10, 2018 file photo Michael Avenatti, is interviewed in New York.

Credit: AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File

Credit: AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File

In this Thursday, May 10, 2018 file photo Michael Avenatti, is interviewed in New York.

Michael Avenatti, the attorney representing adult film star Stormy Daniels in her court battle with President Donald Trump, said Thursday that he’s representing three additional women who claim they were paid for their silence about alleged affairs with Trump ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

Avenatti told a crowd gathered Thursday at a community forum in West Hollywood, California, that the women had reached out to him months earlier, The Associated Press reported. He declined to go into detail about the alleged affairs because he had not asked his clients for permission to share the information first.

He told the crowd he had evidence that the women had relationships with Trump and urged the president’s former longtime personal attorney, Michael Cohen, to tell the public about the women, an entreaty he repeated on Twitter.

The women were “all paid hush money through various means,” Avenatti wrote on Twitter.

Cohen negotiated a $130,000 payment to Daniels in October 2016 in exchange for her signing a nondisclosure agreement barring her from talking about an alleged sexual encounter she had with Trump in 2006, The Wall Street Journal reported in January. The president has denied that he had an affair with Daniels or that he knew about the nondisclosure agreement.

He has also denied claims that he had a nearly yearlong affair in 2006 with former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal. Still, Trump could be heard in a secret recording made by his former attorney in September 2016 discussing a payment made by a media company to McDougal in order to keep her story from becoming public. The rights to McDougal's story were bought in August 2016 by American Media Inc., the company that publishes the National Enquirer, The Wall Street Journal reported.